Founder Mode literally is X.
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I’m not sure that the goal of founder mode is to tank revenue and reputation.
It's all about the vision; remaining in control and staying highly influential. And yes, at the same time the pendulum swings in both ways as we can see with Musk, DHH etc. Pick your "Hero Story" :P
Beck focuses too much on survival, as FWIW Chesky / PG talked about larger companies. Most of them are and will be doing fine either way. Unless this is all about further increasing shareholder value again, which it might. Not a "survival" topic then, or is it?
You are exactly wrong. X is what Paul calls "Manager Mode":
> The theme of Brian's talk was that the conventional wisdom about how to run larger companies is mistaken. 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.
> ...In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from the dismay of founders who've tried it, and the success of their attempts to escape from it.
Musk even gave his editorial blessing as per PG's acknowledgements at the very bottom.
Ah. Another reason Twitter's new name is kind of dumb.