Metadata
- Author: Paul Graham
- Full Title:: Founder Mode
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- Document Tags:: Engineering Management,
- URL:: https://paulgraham.com/foundermode.html
- Finished date:: 2024-09-02
Highlights
As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised him that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale. Their advice could be optimistically summarized as “hire good people and give them room to do their jobs.” He followed this advice and the results were disastrous. So he had to figure out a better way on his own, which he did partly by studying how Steve Jobs ran Apple. So far it seems to be working. Airbnb’s free cash flow margin is now among the best in Silicon Valley. (View Highlight)
Whatever founder mode consists of, it’s pretty clear that it’s going to break the principle that the CEO should engage with the company only via his or her direct reports. “Skip-level” meetings will become the norm instead of a practice so unusual that there’s a name for it. And once you abandon that constraint there are a huge number of permutations to choose from. (View Highlight)
Obviously founders can’t keep running a 2000 person company the way they ran it when it had 20. There’s going to have to be some amount of delegation. Where the borders of autonomy end up, and how sharp they are, will probably vary from company to company. They’ll even vary from time to time within the same company, as managers earn trust. So founder mode will be more complicated than manager mode. But it will also work better. (View Highlight)