Founder Mode misses the point
Founder Mode had a moment, which passed while this sat in my drafts. But with how feral some of these folks have become, I think it’s still applicable.
Paul Graham’s Founder Mode essay missed the point.
The way managers are taught to run companies seems to be like modular design in the sense that you treat subtrees of the org chart as black boxes. You tell your direct reports what to do, and it's up to them to figure out how. But you don't get involved in the details of what they do. That would be micromanaging them, which is bad.
“seems to be” is doing a lot of work here. Like PG doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Who is teaching this? Who is rewarding this behavior? Where are managers who treat their sub-orgs like black boxes getting promoted? Simple: they aren’t.
Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.
Sounds like these founders suck at weeding out fakers in the interview.
What’s really going on? Is there an industry-wide, systemic disease that is causing companies - and supposedly genius founders - to unwittingly sabotage themselves by recruiting incompetent fakers, get confused about whether they are actually producing the right results, promote them in spite of driving down positive outcomes? And the only solution is to double down on idolizing the same tiny number of founders who screwed it up in the first place?
There’s a much simpler explanation. These founders like Chesky are actually EXCELLENT managers. That’s how they built their company! They strike the right balance of hands-off and hands-on. We can call it “micromanaging” or we can call it close collaboration with our team on topics where we have valuable input. It’s just that these manager-founders suck at a very different, but also very important, skill: finding, hiring, directing, and growing managers who can do what they do.
The (wrong) lesson Chesky and PG draw is to fall back on their bias for messiahs when things go south. “Only I can fix it”. That’s self-limiting. The right lesson is “I needed to hire managers and lead them effectively, but based on the results I am not good at doing that. I am good at managing, but I am not good at managing managers. I need to learn how to do that better.” Graham, Chesky, et al draw the wrong lessons from Steve Jobs. Steve hired & promoted GREAT managers. He got out of their way when he had nothing to add. But when he had something to add he was elbows-deep with the team.
Dare Obasanjo, who always has insightful takes, also gets it wrong here by forcing a dichotomy of “founder mode will lead to failure”. “Founder Mode” is just “I am a great manager but I am incompetent at hiring great managers, so instead of learning how to fix that I am going to double down on managing” which is self-limiting. But that doesn’t mean the business will crater (looking at you Dare) - it’s just putting a ceiling on how much the company can grow.