Founder Mode
Day 251 / 366
This recent blog by Paul Graham has led to a lot of discussion amongst the startup community.
In this, Paul mentions that the usual strategy of hiring the best people and giving them space to do their best work might not be the ideal way to run a company. He terms this “Manager Mode” since according to him this approach works if you join an existing company as a manager.
However, if you are founding a company, a lot of the time you have to be quite hands-on while working with your team, while some might call this micro-managing, Paul refers to this as “Founder Mode”, the superior way to run companies.
Paul says that the existing strategy of hiring the best and trusting them to do their best work is the same as “hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground”
There are lots who don’t agree with this, and I am one of them. I really believe that you should have trust in your employees. And that you should give them the space to do their best work. If you think that you are hiring professional fakers, then I would say that the issue is with your hiring process, and that is what you need to fix.
If the CEO or the leader is running everything, there would be an unsaid rule that the CEO knows everything and what he says goes. I would never want to run a company that way. I would like to train my employees to a certain level and then expect them to start using their creativity to come up with solutions for complex problems.