Founder Mode!
I don't know how are you going to take it, but I am writing this as a reflection to Matt. I don't expect him to read this right away, but I am mostly writing for myself as I have this thought process and I don't want to get it to waste. I don't know how many of you know about Y Combinator, YC from now on. It is a primo VC institution, which funded 5000 startups and $600B of combined valuation. Startups at all stages benefit from YC. Some can be a very early stage starup, while others can be 6 years old with a working product like Splinterlands. It is typically a three month program, runs twice a year, where many start ups arrive to pitch their business. Goal of YC is to help startups to take off! YC sort of provides 'traning and group activities' for 11 weeks upto their 'demo day' at the end. YC invests $500K in every company. Some of the very well known ones that went through this program are:
- AirBNB
- Doordash
- Twitch
- Coinbase
CEO of AirBNB Brian Chesky recently gave a talk at one of the YC events. This is where he talked about conventional management style as a company grows from just the Founders and a few workers to 50-100 people. In other words the first phase of growth, something we can relate to in Splinterlands during the last bull run. Conventional management style during this first phase of growth is the general advice:
"hire good people and give them room to do their jobs"
Chesky followed this standard advice to disastrous results at AirBNB. Therefore, fairly quickly he had to find an alternative, and he did that by studying Steve Jobs. So the question: Is that convention advice incorrect?
Well just like everything else in real world business mangement it may or may not be, it depends. That advice is applicable for professional managers, not for founders of a tech company. In many cases, that advice turns into the following:
"hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground."
I have seen this in action from the outside in Splinterlands during the last bull market. The assumption is, as the company scales, you typically like to run it from "founders mode" to "manager mode".
The way managers are trained in management school is to run companies in modular design. 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. Hire great people for a project and let them do it. Do you guys know who said that to me once? Yep, Matt!! LOL.
It sounds good in theory, and perhaps even work in real world at sometimes. However, more often, you end up hiring 'fakers' or good people who turns into 'fakers' and they collectively run their part of the project to the ground, and the same happens to the other module. There goes your modular design!!
The solution seems to be "founder mode" where you skip the middle management and talk directly to the contributor, evaluate his/her work and see if that fits to the goal of the corporation. As you can image this is no easy task. However, Steve Jobs routinely will held offsite with 100 top people at Apple, but they are not top executive, they can be from any level of the company who Steve personally thought are valuable to his goals.
Obviously there must be a balance somewhere. It is impractical to run "Founder Mode" for a 2000 people company. However, it is possible to cut-the-crap even there through an important segment. For example, you don't need to talk to your payroll guy in an international oil exploration company, but you can talk directly to the geologist working on the latest prospect offshore Namibia. You run founder mode in that small segment.
There is a humbling thought out there and it is contrarian. There is always a lot of conventional wisdom and free advice. Usually they are all wrong.
Matt you decide when and where you will need to be in founders mode and when you need to be in manager mode.
