Paul Graham is a man who sometimes says some very clever things and sometimes says some very stupid things. He is extremely rich, which leads him to believe that he knows everything about everything. He does know something about technology, venture capital, and startups. He knows far less about, say, poverty.
A few days ago, he wrote an essay called Founder Mode. Apparently Startup Founders are exactly like electronic circuits in that they switch between 2 binary states: “Founder Mode” and “Manager Mode”. Each founder can then be represented as a bit of information. Under no circumstances should you treat them like a human being. They are just hardware. Founder Mode involves getting stuck into everything. Remember when there were five of us operating out of Philip’s Dad’s garage under his third house? We had to do everything from write the code to clearing the pizza off the walls.
Manager Mode is where you delegate stuff to other people. Graham tells us that ”C-level execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the world” which is frankly too modest. VCs can be very skillful liars as well.
Now I think a good manager will know when to dig into a subordinate’s work and when they will leave them well alone. You absolutely should hire the best people you can. And most of them will probably need your help. Some of them will think they don’t need your help and they will be wrong. A tiny few won’t need your help at all. They are the people that you should be grooming to take over from you if they are up for it. And you will screw things up. The measure of success is that you screw things up less over time.
While Graham implies that what Founders do day to day is different to managers, I am less convinced. In both cases, the individual has more work than they can do in a day so they will need to prioritize. Some of the thing they want done, they either not have the capability or the capacity to do so they need to act though others.
Now Managers and Founders might differ in the levels of autonomy, demands, resources, and support they have. But the critical skill is prioritization and what Graham’s post fails to do is to give the reader any heuristics in terms of where to focus attention. It’s all or nothing. This is not helpful advice.
Finally, Graham claims “‘There are as far as I know no books specifically about founder mode. Business schools don't know it exists.” This might have been true 30 years ago but this is no longer the case. There are books and articles from both academic researchers and practitioners (Hello Steve Blank). Which is what you would expect given the near religious awe offered to Founders over the last decade.
I would also say that we have very few rigorous books on management as a practice (rather than an idealized and artificial set of simplifications) - the work of Fred Luthans being a notable exception. We have lots of books on leadership. And we have lots of books on finance, accounting, HR, marketing, etc. But we have little truly empirical work.
I would humbly suggest that we need to move beyond easy binaries.
What do you think?
