Mode...schmode.
Like a facepalm inside of a slightly larger facepalm
No. I’m not going to link to it here. Go Google it. Paul Graham of Y Combinator recently published an essay that he says was sparked by a talk by AirBnB CEO, Brian Chesky. There are so many things I hate about that essay, its hard to know where to start. How about just the immediate, negative, visceral reaction I have to the term “founder mode” - its right up there with my loathing of the term “creatives” - both terms immediately create exclusionary circles and while you do need to have founded something in order to, I guess, have access to the appropriate mode, creatives is typically used either to refer to graphic artists (at least in the corporate sphere) which just means that no one else in the org is creative and believe me, I’ve seen my share of damned creative reports, QBRs and more.
As far as motivations for his essay, gee whiz, I CAN NOT for the life of me imagine why anyone who runs an accelerator like Y Combinator, would have a vested self-interest in promoting some “mode” of running a company that essentially encourages a founder to drive a company and themselves as hard as they can…let me guess….until they get to an exit. Gosh, that has to be a coincidence.
One of the phrases that Graham tosses around is “merely a professional manager.” Again, this kind of language serves to minimize and diminish anyone who doesn’t have the magical appellation of founder after their name. I wonder if he thinks of Tim Cook, who did not found Apple, as a mere manager. I mean all Cook has done is manage Apple to being one of, if not the, most valuable companies in the world. Something that the founder that Graham lauds, Jobs, did not do. I’m also struck by something I read in The Idea Factory - the story of Bell Labs. One of the points that the book makes is that while it was amazing to have people like Claude Shannon riding around on a unicycle and inventing, you know, information theory (just that little thing that allows everything we’re talking about to happen) - what was key was having PROFESSIONAL MANAGERS who knew how to take his ideas and turn them into products. I mean I know they call Shannon’s paper, the Magna Carta of the Information Age, but I don’t think he was very involved in startups and probably didn’t have a lot of successful exits, so that’s a pretty big mark against him.
He also manages to run down not just professional managers but also CEOs, COOs, etc by arguing that “C-level execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the world. What a relief that, as a class, this has never applied to either a VC or a founder - Elizabeth Holmes was asked for a comment but did not reply before my deadline.
I’d also be remiss if I didn’t a chef’s kiss of sarcastic recognition to statements like “there are as far as I know no books specifically about founder mode. Business schools don't know it exists. All we have so far are the experiments of individual founders who've been figuring it out for themselves.” I do have to give Paul credit for this - one of my next moves will be to make up something that doesn’t exist (or better yet, just give a management style a new nickname and act like I discovered something - sort of the Chris Columbus School of Discovery) and then proclaim its new because there aren’t any books about the thing I just made up.
To be fair though, this just continues a rich tradition of casting SV types, founders if you will (but probably also VC), as the ONLY ones smart enough and courageous enough to access this particular hard drive of wisdom. Its reminiscent of the SV type who thought we needed some BRAND NEW academic discipline that studied how humans live and work together and generally exist and had the whole world point out to him that things like sociology, anthropology, and history, you know, actually exist. All this while they sit on the shoulders of giants who created TCP/IP, WiFi, hypertext, GUI, and WSYWIG to name a few.
Since we’re talking about the courage evident in founders, Graham points to this - “For example, Steve Jobs used to run an annual retreat for what he considered the 100 most important people at Apple, and these were not the 100 people highest on the org chart. Can you imagine the force of will it would take to do this at the average company?” Amazing. Really people, can you imagine summoning up - what was it? - the FORCE OF WILL…to hold a retreat? Right up there with Oppenheimer right?
On this 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,” I can confidently declare Graham wrong in at least two cases. I’ve worked in 2 of the largest organizations in the world - orgs that would seem to be perfect for the black box contagion that he warns against - those two being the Pentagon and Amazon. In the Pentagon I worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (think of OSD as BIG org in a REALLY BIG org) and I saw manager after manager who made sure that his reports understood “commander’s intent” and then gave them the freedom, with appropriate oversight, to accomplish their missions. At Amazon, I worked in a number of orgs but did get to go to a full S-Team meeting (with Jeff B, Andy J, etc) and watch how they operated. They did a great job of modeling the very principles which govern every other meeting I’d ever been in at Amazon. Those leadership principles allow a small, garage-based startup to scale to 1.5 million employees worldwide. Micromanaging is not accountability - its micromanaging.
Finally this bit of Cassandra-ish talk “hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it's described that way, doesn't it? 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” - is just so jaded and cynical and leads to the logical conclusion that a founder should not hire anyone - since they can trust none of these - what was it - professional fakers.
I don’t know what else to say except I’ll add “founder mode” to my list of phrases that if heard uttered non-ironically, will cause me to stop listening almost immediately and move into “sarcasm and derision mode” - on which there are plenty of books.