Metadata
- Author: Charity
- Full Title:: “Founder Mode” and the Art of Mythmaking
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- URL:: https://charity.wtf/2024/12/17/founder-mode-and-the-art-of-mythmaking/
- Read date:: 2025-01-23
Highlights
If everybody’s already buzzing about something, I feel like chances are, everything that needs to be said is already being said by someone else, so why should I bother? (View Highlight)
He talks about the people who worked for him in supremely belittling terms — “C players”, “incapable”, “mediocre”, “worst people”. And he takes absolutely zero responsibility for the corporate disaster that developed in slow motion under his watch, while taking ALL the credit for its recovery. (View Highlight)
In the end, I forced myself to buckle down and get this piece out because … between PG’s “founder mode” essay and the wide distribution of the Chesky interview, these opinions have already imprinted onto generations of Silicon Valley founders and leaders. They have seeped into the water table, and there’s no going back. (View Highlight)
So let’s take a marketing or creative department. There’s a team in Airbnb doing graphics and different parts of the site need graphics, advertising needs graphics. And when it was five teams, the five teams would ask the graphics department for graphics and they’d have like five requests. And then pretty soon it’s 20 teams and once it’s 20 teams…they’re like the deli, there’s a line out the block, there’s a multi-month wait. And then what happens is the graphics team, the central service, kind of like gives up and everything seems pointless. And the teams waiting forever give up and they say, ‘give me my own people’. So now they get their own graphics team. So now you have 5 or 10 graphics teams. And you can do the same thing with technology. And product. Oh, you can have 10 data teams that have different metrics and we can go down the list. (View Highlight)
You should ALWAYS have as few employees as possible. Always. Hiring more people should never be the first lever you reach for, it’s what you do after exhausting your other options. Doing great things with a small team is always something to brag about. (View Highlight)
Your managers should be subject matter experts (View Highlight)
I’m mostly looking at the work. I’m not like having career conversations all day long. That’s crazy.” (View Highlight)
you should actually start in the details, develop trust, develop muscle memory and then let go. So great leadership is presence not absence.” (View Highlight)
There are many paths up the mountain This is an architecture problem. The Chesky/Airbnb architecture is like a monolith application, or a single-threaded process. Everything goes through the CEO, and that’s how they maintain quality. The Hastings/Netflix architecture is more like a microservices application or a threaded, highly concurrent process. Either can work. Both have tradeoffs and implications. (View Highlight)
We look for executives who can both scale up and scale down. Scale up: you can speak credibly to the board, at the right level of abstraction vs detail, you can craft strategy, see around corners etc. Scale down: you know what “good” looks like for work all over your organization, you can get down in the weeds to help coach a struggling IC back to victory, you can debug a flailing campaign or workflow. Both matter. (View Highlight)