Paul Graham has written a great new essay called Founder Mode, which argues, in summary that great founders have hired great executives and it’s not worked. Instead the thing that works is “founder mode” which is direct involvement and oversight, of what would be typically called micromanagement. He argues we should, manage more “like Steve Jobs and and less like John Sculley,” citing Jobs’ annual ‘top 100 people meeting’ which crossed reporting lines as evidence of Job’s unique founder approach.
This would all hold together a bit better if Jobs’ himself didn’t say exactly the opposite:
It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to to. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.
Of course, Jobs was also famously in the details in the areas of design, product marketing, and business development.
What gives? I hate to break it to you: this is also a bit more complicated than two binary options.
First, let me tackle one core problem of Graham’s essay: tremendous sampling bias. It’s possible that these extraordinarily great, craft oriented founders who have built important companies are right. But my guess is actually that the same micromanagement bias has made them so successful has made them not as successful in hiring great people.
The great people I know don’t want to be micromanaged. Actually, it’s a bit more specific than that: they want tremendous agency, high autonomy AND they want to have great leaders who are pushing them to be better in specific, high context ways. You can call that micromanagement but I think it’s actually something different.
I wonder how the essay would have changed if Graham had also spoken with folks like Jeff Bezos and Reed Hastings - the founder CEOs who write about management and leadership instead of craft.
If you look at Hastings, Bezos, and Jobs the playbook looks a bit something like:
Hire great people with high agency and taste
Lean on those people tremendously so that you can:
Spend as much as time as possible on the most important things
The most important things will change dynamically based a) needs of the company b) the individual strengths of your leadership team (aka task level maturity) and c) your own strengths.
Reduce information barriers. Go all the way to the bottom as a leader. Share feedback broadly.
This is a bit more complicated than a binary set of modes, and in this context, it’s interesting to look at the management styles of Intel and Nvidia.
Intel pseudo-founder and long term CEO Andy Grove emphasized in his classic book High Output Management structured 1:1s, clear upwards reporting, and ‘task-relevant maturity,’ which means each person has areas of greater expertise (and thus great trust) and areas in which they need more supervision.
Nvidia founder’s Jensen Huang, on the other hand, has 60 direct reports and doesn’t do 1:1s. Critically, this only works, as Huang says - when your direct reports are “E-level” - they don’t need much management by the time they’re at that level.
In the insightful interview linked above that that Patrick Collison did with Huang says: “I try to do no operational meetings. I’ve got amazing people in the company who are doing these. CEOs are pinch hitters. We should be working on the things that no one else can or is.”
The great non-founder CEOs are the ones who take this prerogative - it’s hard to think of Khosrowshahi and Slootman as any step behind the founder CEOs. Instead of defining founder mode vs manager mode, I would say this:
Hire the best people you can and give them huge amounts of agency in the areas they are great
This should enable you to be wildly in the details in your zone of genius and/or the things that simply aren’t being solved by your management team due to your own failures
Constantly innovate on information flows to enable as much flatness as possible
Absolutely - in the conversation about leadership people tend to forget that employees and future leaders value agency. Thanks for the reminder
pg summarized it as "hire good people and give them room to do their jobs." I think that good/great distinction might matter a lot here. Jobs seems to have hired the best when he could and listened to them. A lot of great people came out of Apple. Has Airbnb had any remarkable alumni? None come to mind for me but I could be mistaken.