"Same results as everybody else" and "founder mode"

A post by Paul Graham caught a lot of attraction in the Refactoring community a couple of weeks ago. I read the post a couple of times, and then rushed to share my thoughts (which I reproduce below). The essence (at the time) is that I was skeptical, even though I think Paul Graham's post asks a compelling question: what if the common way to run companies is not the best after all?

Last week I finally had time to watch a couple appearances by Brian Chesky which I believe give an insight into what Brian Chesky might have have said at the YC event mentioned by PG, which is, AFAIU, not publicly available. For the record I watched these two:



and I have to admit his ideas resonated a lot with me. Abstracting to the core I would say that Brian's approach can be summarized as
"if you do what everyone else does, you'll get the same results everyone else gets"
The fact that Airbnb's free cash flow margin is now among the best in Silicon Valley, proves the point.

One more thing, I, like others initially mistook founder mode for micromanagement when it is in fact, as Brian calls it "being in the details". This resonates a lot with me: do I want to be in the details? sure thing and I do it by, as an example, asking the right questions and avidly reading post-mortems.

Do yourself a favour and go and watch those two videos (the first one is a pretty god summary, and is shorter). Paul Graham's writing does not do justice to the depth of Brian Chesky intuition.

My initial thoughts as shared on the Refactoring community (slightly edited to fit this context):

I read it a couple of times and to me it smells of survivor bias and guru-worship, while saying very little of practical use. It does reveal some interesting questions though.

Some background first: while I was reading it I was reminded of some of Drucker writings, explaining the rise of management as a function necessary for the existence of the modern organization, and as opposed to the original notion of the owner ruling over the organization like a god (a expression used by others, not me but that I think well conveys the idea). This notion is also mentioned by Ackoff in this 1993 presentation on system thinking.
Once you understand the role of management I think one sees the limitations of PG excitement about “founder mode”, and I think the strongest argument against it is that there is a critically limited supply of Steve Jobs in circulation. And surely Steve Jobs relied on layers of management to get things done, some of them have themselves become famous.

I do however understand and share the interest on the underlying question which is: how do we run organizations (I’m expanding the question to include not just Silicon Valley startups) effectively? And that is a very complex question which I don’t think can be answered by suggesting that the founders take all the burden on themselves, but I will agree that a motivated leader or leadership (not just managers, but leaders) will significantly increase the odds of success.
Being available to all levels of the company (like the retreats organized by Jobs), being in touch with customers (not just the CEO, but also the users), and generally making sure that their mental model is sufficiently aligned with reality is IMHO a desirable trait of any leader, regardless of founder or other modes. Perhaps this is more present in founder mode, I’ll certainly agree to that.
And that behavior will be copied by others, with the founder being the positive role model, ultimately creating a organization that’s wired to some kind of behavior which might ultimately be successful.

There’s also the other aspect of there being extremely successful, huge and boring companies, but maybe this is not interesting to PG, which is of course perfectly fine.