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at last week's yc event, brian chesky gave a lecture on how some traditional ideas about managing large companies are wrong. paul graham published the content of brian chesky's speech in his article "founder mode", which was recognized by many bigwigs, and musk also forwarded it and said it was worth reading.

• the founder model and the professional manager model are two ways of managing a company. the professional manager model is far inferior to the founder model because the founder can do things that professional managers cannot do.
• the traditional way that founders are advised to run large companies is wrong because founders are told how to be professional managers, that is, how to run a company that they did not start.
• the founder model requires managers to be involved in every detail of the company's business.
• the founder model breaks the pattern of the ceo interacting with the company only through direct subordinates, and "skipping" meetings become the norm rather than the exception.
• the founder model also requires a certain degree of decentralization.

paul graham said:

“i completely changed the way i ran the company. i used to be very hands-off and thought my job was to set strategy and allocate capital, but i was also very passive and the less involved i was, the easier it was for me to get caught up in problems.

then i decided to do something different, and i was involved in every detail of the company, and i would not do anything at airbnb that was beyond my personal ability, which is what steve jobs did at apple.”

brex ceo pedro franceschi also said that switching to founder mode was the best decision he had ever made. the company is growing twice as fast as it was a year ago, and annual expenses have been reduced by 70%:

“in practice, this means that the company’s executives must work at every level just like the founders.”

at a yc event last week, brian chesky gave a talk that everyone in the room remembered. most of the founders i talked to after the talk said it was the best talk they had ever heard. even ron conway forgot to take notes for the first time. i'm not going to recreate brian's talk here, but i want to talk about a question he raised.

the theme of brian's speech was that traditional ideas about how to manage a large company are wrong. as airbnb grew, many well-meaning people told him that the company had to be managed in a certain way in order to scale. in short, the advice can be summed up as follows: hire good people and give them space to do their work. brian followed this advice, but the results were disastrous. so he had to find a better way himself, and he was partly inspired by how steve jobs ran apple. so far, brian's approach has worked well, and airbnb's free cash flow margin is currently among the best in silicon valley.

the audience at the event included many of the most successful founders we’ve funded, and they said they’d been in the same situation, that they’d received similar advice on how to run their company, and that advice had hurt their company instead of helping it.

why is everyone giving these founders the wrong advice? this puzzled me. after some thought, i found the answer:the traditional way that founders are told to manage a large company is wrong because founders are told how to be a professional manager, that is, to manage a company that they did not start. however, the professional manager model does not work as well as the founder model., founders will feel like a failure in this way. founders can do things that professional managers can’t do, and not executing the founder model will make founders feel wrong, because it is.

in fact,there are two ways to manage a company: the founder model and the professional manager model.by now, even in silicon valley, most people assume that scaling a startup means switching from founder mode to manager mode. but we can infer the existence of founder mode from the disappointment felt by founders who try it, and from their efforts to escape it.

as far as i know, there are no books dedicated to discussing founder patterns, and business schools don't know about the existence of founder patterns. what we have now are some experiences that founders have figured out on their own. but now that we know what we are looking for, we can start exploring, and hopefully in a few years, founder patterns will be as widely understood as professional manager patterns. we can already guess at the differences between founder patterns and professional manager patterns.

professional managers are often taught to run a company in a modular way. professional managers tell subordinates what to do, and then the subordinates figure out how to do it themselves. professional managers do not get deeply involved in the specific details of their subordinates' work. this is seen as micromanagement, which is not good.

“hiring great people and giving them space to do great work.” sounds great, right? but in reality, founders report that it often means hiring professional scammers to bring the company down.

i noticed that both brian’s talk and my subsequent conversations with founders mentioned a feeling of being “mentally manipulated.” founders feel “mentally manipulated” by two parties—one by those who tell them they must run the company like a professional manager, and the other by the employees who work for them when they do. usually, when everyone around you disagrees with you, you assume you’re wrong, but running a company is an exception. venture capitalists who haven’t been founders don’t know how founders should run a company, and the c-level executives include some of the best liars in the world[1].

whatever the founder model is, it will clearly break with the principle that the ceo only interacts with the company through exponential subordinates. “skip-level” meetings will become the norm, rather than a highly unusual practice.once you let go of that limitation, there are a huge number of combinations of choices.

for example, jobs used to hold an annual retirement party for what he considered the 100 most important people at apple, who were not the top 100 people in the company. can you imagine the willpower it would take to do this in a normal company? yet imagine how useful such a practice might be. it might make a large company feel like a startup. jobs obviously wouldn’t have continued holding these retirement parties if they didn’t work. but i’ve never heard of any other company doing this. is it a good idea, or a bad idea? we still don’t know. this is why we know so little about founder patterns.[2]

obviously, the founder cannot continue to manage a company of 2,000 people in the same way as he managed 20 people, and a certain degree of decentralization must be achieved.where the boundaries of autonomy are and how clear they are can vary from company to company. even within the same company, they can vary based on the trust that managers have earned. as a result, the founder model can be more complex than the manager model, but it can also be more effective. we already know this from the approaches that individual founders have figured out.

in fact, another prediction i had about founder mode was that once we figured out what it was, we’d find that a lot of founders were already close to or doing it, but they were considered weird or bad at doing it.[3]

it’s interesting how little we know about founder patterns, which is an inspiring thought. look at what founders have accomplished, but they’ve accomplished it under the weight of bad advice. imagine what they’d accomplish if we told them how to run their companies like steve jobs instead of john sculley.

[1] to put it more politely, experienced c-level executives are often very good at managing up. i don’t think anyone who knows the world would dispute that.

[2] if the practice of hosting such events becomes so widespread that even mature, politically driven companies begin to do it, we could quantify the aging of a company by the average depth of the invitees on the organizational chart.

[3] i have another, less optimistic prediction: once the idea of ​​founder mode is established, people will start to abuse it. founders who can’t delegate even the things they should will use founder mode as an excuse. or managers who aren’t founders will decide they should try to act like founders. this may work to some extent, but when it doesn’t work, the results are terrible. a modular management approach at least limits the damage a bad ceo can do.