tptacek
2 days ago
When the post came out, for the first time in a long time I found myself nodding my head with Graham, because I feel like basically everyone who has worked in a company that has found some form of product/market fit and started staffing and and delegating has had the experience of watching pasteurized process cheese food faceplant trying to understand and further a sane goal a founding team got some traction with when it was smaller. Everyone has. There was something to it. But now, as usual, everyone has overindexed on everything, so we're sitting here comparing Aaron Swartz to Sam Altman as if either of them would be successful parachuted into the median immediate-post-PMF company.
As is so often the case, these stories are just vectors along which we recapitulate our existing beliefs. Woz vs. Jobs! We'll be talking about this 50 years from now, as if there was anything to learn from it.
Of course, this means the original post, the "founder mode" post, was bad. The first cut of most things is bad! I've talked to 2 people now who saw the AirBNB talk that prompted it, and both said the talk was way better than the "founder mode" post, which left both scratching their heads. Maybe someone (maybe Graham) will find a better way to distill the talk? Neither of my friends will go into more detail about that talk, so I hope someone does.
In the meantime: this all feels like drama for its own sake. Certainly, if we're talking about business and invoking aaronsw, it seems safe to guess there isn't much trenchant in this particular story. "Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz". For fuck's sake.
benreesman
17 hours ago
“everyone overindexing on everything” is the kind of glib linguistic failure mode that gives powerful nerds a bad name: people who read it got dumber thereby because it’s got a hip sound and some pseudo-technical vibe and means nothing. And deploying that to hand-wave over the difference between Aaron Swartz and Sam Altman is pretty offensive to anything like the better angels of hacker culture.
One of those people actually died directly downstream of an act of civil disobedience with the issue being the commons of scientific knowledge. One of those people is on the shortest of lists around blurring the line between train and validation sets for personal financial gain so callously and so effectively that we’ll be years if not decades recovering.
People listen to you. I listen to you.
Aaron Swartz is nothing to do with this perverse contemporary thing. Far more recently than intuitive, our role models would sacrifice everything they have to take a stand. Today influential people take a stand on their own narrow self-interest even if it requires the sacrifice of what everyone has.
tptacek
a day ago
Wow, this is a badly written comment. I mean I agree with it. I think.
nazka
7 hours ago
Is the talk not recorded? If not, can he do it again? It seems people who were at the talk, talk more about the talk than this post.
JumpCrisscross
a day ago
> this all feels like drama for its own sake
It’s broadcasting that Y Combinator is a founder friendly investor. That comes with costs, e.g. if LPs think YC would have doubled down on the next Neumann or Bankman-Fried, or that its leadership is going full Ackman. But it will work at the margins for deal-finding partners, particularly with young founders.
The hilarious part is this obviously wasn’t a message they trusted their partners to deliver. An army with precision weapons and intelligence doesn’t carpet bomb; YC is carpet bombing.
tptacek
a day ago
You mean the Graham post, right? Sure; I mean, I don't think it was a calculated move to market YC --- for one thing, YC more or less sets the industry standard for founder-friendliness --- but I could see how the ABNB talk may have rhymed with something Graham believes is a strength of YC.
My thing here is with this particular Ian Betteridge post. I don't think it says anything. It feels like it exists just to connect the "founder mode" meme to a cast of prefab heroes and villains, Swarz and Srinavasan, Woz and Jobs. I have a couple problems with that:
* While I don't think the "founder mode" post is aging well, I don't think it's at all about promoting the mythology of Jobs or marca or sama. Like I said in my addled previous comment, I think the "founder mode" post describes a very real phenomenon that people who build companies run into all the time and talk about all the time.
* I don't think "heroes and villains" is a useful frame with which to understand the technology industry, and they're especially not useful for understand what does and doesn't work when building a company. It's irritating that the post sort of implicitly asks us to think about whether Swartz or Altman are better (or worse, or something?) at managing companies.
* It is very weird to me to try to build in 2024 an argument around the idea that Graham is unfamiliar with what does and doesn't constitute effective management.
* I am past tired of people casting Steve Wozniak as the soul of what's good about Apple, and Jobs as a manifestation of what's fake about it. Like Steve Arlo said in Zero Effect: there are no good guys and bad guys; it's just a bunch of guys.
Sorry, some of this isn't really a response to you so much as an attempt to salvage what I was trying to say with my preceding comment. It was our last block party of the year. I was apparently in a state.
gradschoolfail
14 hours ago
in vino veritas. surely PG, just emerging from a smothering of left-field rhymes, was in something like a state?
I agree that almost all the time its just a bunch of guys. Would you agree, though, that this time round it’s about good vs evil organizational structures?
Specifically, Apple are relevant because their designer stratum (generalizable to Jobs’ habit of reifying ICs, so that Woz enters en passant) rhymes with the intended designer culture in AirBnB (& YC if only because their current prez was designer culture raised)
Let me know if i somehow got the pulse on anything in your opinion.
tptacek
14 hours ago
Maybe! I can't think of many times I've read something I wrote the night before, literally cringed, and thought "what the fuck". I'm enjoying it! I recommend everyone find a way to have this experience. You have to do it in good faith though or it doesn't work.
What you're saying about Apple and AirBNB sounds plausible? I know next to nothing about ABNB's culture and operation. I know a fair bit about Apple's, and reductionist takes about Apple bug me. But like, if you're saying something concrete about Apple you're doing better than the post we're commenting on!
"Vectors along which we recapitulate our existing beliefs". Yeesh.
082349872349872
11 hours ago
How about this[0] for an "it's just a bunch of folks" hypothesis:
Some folks internalise the goals of an organisation well, and some internalise them poorly. Among domesticated animals, dogs and horses internalise their owners goals well, and cats poorly. (even in the animal world, specific individuals all have different time constants for how long you can leave them unsupervised before they get into trouble)
Most of the discussion I've skimmed on HN (including PG's original) assumes that founder mode is necessary because the external bigcorp hires are more like cats, and do what they want: pad their headcount, feather their nest, orphan their mistakes, etc.; any indication they added value at their previous job is just a slick con because the C- and V-suiters are exceptionally good at managing upward.
However, let's go back to that time constant: there's another variable here among animals, and that's how strong a reminder it takes to reset the clock. I don't think there's any horse which can be left next to bucket of grain without getting into it eventually. However, some horses can be reminded not to get into it by calling their name; other horses need a tug on a lead line; yet others pretty much need to be tied down on both sides.
A good faith hypothesis would be that the people PG was complaining about did do a good job at their previous position, and the difference is in leadership style: an engineering founder is going to be low-touch; the engineering paradigm is fire-and-forget, get a good person, tell them the problem is X, and they come back with a sol'n to X. What if (as at most bigcorps) the CEO had come up through two or three decades of sales instead? Then they will be high-touch, and constantly checking in to make sure things are moving forward[1], while being very experienced in (and sensitive to) all the ways people bullshit to cover a lack of momentum. So, in contrast to a tech founder, a sales CEO may be very effective out of getting good work out of a "Whiskey Priest" report, who has a short-time constant for staying out of trouble, but also —although they do need some attention— doesn't take much wrangling to remember to walk the line: less like cats, more like dogs who can't help but notice the squirrels, but can quickly be dissuaded from chasing them with no more than a verbal reminder.[2]
Does that make sense?
[0] caveat: I haven't read TFA or the other threads or even the ancestors here, and had been planning to discuss this with gradschoolfail in better context, but thought it might be nice to get your (tptacek) opinion as well.
[1] what is the difference between real estate heaven, and real estate hell? In heaven, there's a lively market and everyone is doing deals right and left. In hell, there's a lively market and everyone is doing deals right and left — but escrow never closes.
[2] in particular, this suggests that "founder mode" may initially show some positive effects (in that it forces the founder into a high-touch regime), but it would be possible to do even better by teaching founders to "ride herd" — rather than constantly making drastic interventions with individuals (especially other peoples' individuals!), it ought to scale better to constantly be making subtle interventions —story telling?— to keep the mob generally moving in the proper direction at the proper pace. (if this last analogy doesn't make any sense, let me know and I can easily illustrate it with a few examples from defrost's mustering video)
Mistletoe
a day ago
I wonder if we really will be talking about Woz vs. Jobs in 50 years? It has already been about 50 years. I don’t think that many people still talk about Rockefeller vs. Carnegie. Really the way Carnegie is still talked about is for his philanthropy and building 2500 libraries, etc. Those things remain.
noobermin
7 hours ago
Woz hasn't really left anything...that he has or will get credit for other than amongst nerds really.
gwd
a day ago
> But now, as usual, everyone has overindexed on everything, so we're sitting here comparing Aaron Swartz to Sam Altman as if either of them would be successful parachuted into the median immediate-post-PMF company.
Yeah, my take was that the AirBNB guy said, "I was told A, so I did B. C happened, which was terrible. So I did D, and E happened, which was better."
Paul said, "Huh, lots of people seem to have a similar issue with A. There's a general pattern here we should figure out."
But basically all the subsequent discussions have been about A, without knowing even what B, C, D, and E were; much less knowing what all the other similar experiences were that prompted Paul's post. Maybe Paul's an idiot or maybe he's a genius, but without that data there's no way to tell.
tim333
a day ago
I think a lot of people are taking Paul way too seriously. I mean he listened to the AirBnB talk, wrote his version of it on his blog and tweeted that he did. That's about it. Otherwise he leads a mostly retired life in England and is not really the evil genius controlling silicon valley.