Point Nine hat dies direkt geteilt
Paul Graham’s “Founder Mode” post has swept through the startup world like a tornado and has become an instant classic. The reason it resonated so deeply with founders is that anyone who’s ever tried to scale a company carries deep scars from all those VP hires that didn’t work out. The chaos left behind, the cleanup, the quarters (sometimes years) lost ... Recruiting people who can do the job better than a founder is extremely hard. Having started the company from scratch, spoken to hundreds of prospects early on, and been involved in every little decision early on, founders know so much more about the company’s product, mission and customers that even best executives can’t compete. What’s more, no hire will ever be as committed or work as hard as a founder. PG argues that founders are uniquely positioned to drive a company’s success by staying hands-on, even as it grows. Indeed, if we look at our portfolio, with very few exceptions, the most successful companies are those still driven by their founders 10+ years after the start. And yet, the take-away from PG’s post can’t be that founders should keep doing everything themselves. I don’t believe PG intends this to be the take-away (see his footnotes), but my concern is that many people will draw the wrong conclusion. To build a large company, you have to assemble an amazing team and hire leaders that you can trust with large amounts of responsibility. I’m not saying founders should ever completely remove themselves from Sales or Product, but they can’t micromanage every department either. So how do you find that balance? I’ve been discussing the topic with Michael Wolfe in the last few days, and he just published a great post based on his 30 years of startup experience. In our view, Founder Mode means: - Knowing where to dive deep and where to step back - Spending time with the right people and projects and letting others run on their own - Learning how to manage people and projects tightly but in a way that builds trust instead of eroding it - Accepting the risk of failure but not accepting sloppiness and low quality What do you think?