Words on Founder Mode

42 points by Spoom 9 months ago | 9 comments
  • jawns 9 months ago
    The final sentence: "Hire leaders, not managers."

    Left unsaid: This is incredibly hard to do well.

    Even if you base your hiring on solid evidence of past successes, you're never going to know for sure whether the person is going to be able to achieve the same sorts of successes within your organization, with its own unique culture, structure, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, etc.

    It's made all the more difficult by the fact that you have to be able to distinguish between true leaders and those who have ascended the corporate ladder through Batesian mimicry (basically by superficially resembling true leaders). So it's really tricky to tell one from the other under the constrained environment of an job interview.

    • sevensor 9 months ago
      > Hire leaders, not managers

      Previous employer bought this line and was drowning in an excess of leadership. Turns out you do actually need good managers.

      • qazxcvbnmlp 9 months ago
        Management and leadership are different skills and fundamentally different endeavors. They both involve influencing the direction of people, but from different angles.

        Need both in a healthy team.

        ‘Hire leaders’ appeals to teams that lack direction. ‘Hire managers’ appeals to teams without discipline.

      • alphazard 9 months ago
        It's so hard to do well that most organizations shouldn't do it. I have never seen a good manager hired from the market. Through referrals/network: yes, from within: yes, but never from a posting "come be a manager here". I'm not sure if the interview funnel is hard to build, or if the posting attracts the wrong sorts of people, or maybe another reason entirely.

        The common theme in both of the successful methods is that the candidate's leadership ability has already been observed. And if they already work for you, then they have a value adding position they can revert to if they turn out not to be a great leader.

      • whiplash451 9 months ago
        Honestly this whole yack shaving around Founder Mode and variants of it is getting really tired and tiring.

        The only thing to be said is that every company is unique at a unique point in time and space. Very little truly actionable feedback is to be learned from either successes or failures of the past.

        You are on your own.

        • russelldjimmy 9 months ago
          I’m inclined to agree. There is an underlying (mostly unquestioned) assumption that surely there must be something actionable to learn from the articulation of the history of other companies. But… maybe not? Just because we can clump a bunch of people and processes together to call it a “company” doesn’t make it the same (or even remotely similar) to any other company! Every company is unique at every point in time and space, and companies are made of people, who are also unique at every point in time and space.

          Maybe the scary truth surely is that we are always on our own, and our longing for security and familiarity draws us to a sort of pareidolia - seeing patterns where there are probably none. Add to that a survivorship bias of a few people who succeeded and possibly assign causation to the correlation of having succeeded after following the previously mentioned articulations.

          It’s late here! I’ll read this comment once again in the morning and see if it makes any sense or if the HN pitchforks are out for me ;)

          • whiplash451 9 months ago
            Your comment is spot on and way richer than mine. Leave it there, please!
          • gipp 9 months ago
            The whole discourse that has exploded around this phrase, and the amount of self-seriousness and dogma about it in this sites comment sections have been really baffling to me. One overconfident billionaire writes an essay about a phrase some speaker had made up weeks before, and suddenly everyone's acting like the concept of "founder mode" is some metaphysical constant, and it's our job to understand its true nature through theological debate.
            • 9 months ago
          • neerajdotname2 9 months ago
            fuck founder mode. Work in "fuck off" mode.

            https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1fgv248/fuck_founder_...

            • 9 months ago