创始人模式--格雷厄姆

以下是 Paul Graham 的文章《创始人模式》的翻译：

创始人模式

2024 年 9 月

上周在一个 Y Combinator 的活动中，Brian Chesky 做了一个演讲，在场的每个人都会记住。我之后与大多数创始人交谈时，他们都说这是他们听过的最好的演讲。Ron Conway 生平第一次忘记做笔记。我不打算在这里复述演讲内容。相反，我想讨论一下它引发的一个问题。

Brian 演讲的主题是，关于如何管理大型公司的传统智慧是错误的。随着 Airbnb 的成长，一些好意的人建议他必须以某种方式来经营公司才能实现规模化。他们的建议可以乐观地概括为"雇佣优秀的人，给他们空间来完成工作"。他遵循了这些建议，结果却是灾难性的。所以他不得不自己摸索出一个更好的方法，部分是通过研究 Steve Jobs 如何管理苹果公司。到目前为止，这种方法似乎是有效的。Airbnb 的自由现金流利润率现在位居硅谷前列。

这次活动的听众中包括许多我们资助过的最成功的创始人，他们一个接一个地表示，同样的事情也发生在他们身上。他们在公司成长过程中得到了相同的建议，但这些建议不仅没有帮助到公司，反而损害了公司。

为什么每个人都在告诉这些创始人错误的做法？这对我来说是个大谜题。经过一番思考后，我找到了答案：他们被告知的是如何管理一家你没有创立的公司——如何作为一个职业经理人来管理公司。但这种模式效率低下，以至于对创始人来说感觉是错误的。创始人可以做一些经理人做不到的事情，而不去做这些事情对创始人来说感觉是错误的，因为确实如此。

实际上，有两种不同的方式来经营公司：**创始人模式和经理人模式。**直到现在，即使在硅谷，大多数人也隐含地假设，创业公司的规模化意味着切换到经理人模式。但我们可以从那些尝试过这种模式的创始人的沮丧，以及他们试图摆脱这种模式的成功中推断出另一种模式的存在。

据我所知，目前还没有专门讨论创始人模式的书籍。商学院也不知道它的存在。我们目前所拥有的只是一些个别创始人自己摸索出来的经验。但既然我们知道我们在寻找什么，我们就可以去研究它。我希望在几年内，创始人模式能像经理人模式一样被充分理解。我们现在已经可以猜测它们之间的一些差异。

经理人被教导如何经营公司的方式似乎类似于模块化设计，即你将组织架构图中的子树视为黑盒。你告诉你的直接下属该做什么，而如何做则由他们自己决定。但你不参与他们工作的细节。那样会被视为微观管理，这是不好的。雇佣优秀的人，给他们空间来完成工作。听起来很棒，不是吗？但根据一个又一个创始人的报告，在实践中，这往往意味着：雇佣专业的"假装者"，让他们把公司推向深渊。

我在 Brian 的演讲中，以及之后与创始人交谈时注意到的一个主题是"被洗脑"的想法。创始人感觉自己从两个方面被洗脑——一方面是那些告诉他们必须像经理人一样经营公司的人，另一方面是当他们这样做时为他们工作的人。通常情况下，当你周围的每个人都不同意你的观点时，你的默认假设应该是你错了。但这是少有的例外之一。那些自己没有做过创始人的风险投资人不知道创始人应该如何经营公司，而 C 级高管作为一个群体，包括了世界上一些最善于说谎的人。

[1]

无论创始人模式包含什么，很明显它将打破 CEO 只能通过直接下属与公司互动的原则。"跨级"会议将成为常态，而不是一种特殊到需要专门命名的做法。一旦你放弃了这个限制，就会有大量的排列组合可供选择。

例如，Steve Jobs 曾经每年举办一次他认为是苹果公司 100 个最重要的人的 retreat，而这 100 个人并不是组织架构图上最高的 100 个人。你能想象在普通公司做这种事需要多大的意志力吗？然而想象一下这种做法可能带来的效果。它可以让一个大公司感觉像一个创业公司。Steve 显然不会一直举办这些 retreat，除非它们确实有效。但我从未听说过其他公司这样做。那么，这是个好主意还是坏主意？我们仍然不知道。这就是我们对创始人模式了解得如此之少的原因。

[2]

显然，创始人不可能像管理 20 人的公司那样管理 2000 人的公司。必然需要一定程度的授权。自主权的边界最终在哪里，以及这些边界有多清晰，可能因公司而异。甚至在同一家公司内，随着时间的推移，当经理人赢得信任时，这些边界也会发生变化。所以创始人模式会比经理人模式更复杂。但它也会更有效。我们已经从个别创始人摸索前进的例子中看到了这一点。

事实上，关于创始人模式，我还有另一个预测：一旦我们弄清楚它是什么，我们会发现一些个别创始人已经接近了它——只不过在做他们所做的事情时，他们被许多人视为怪人或更糟。

[3]

有趣的是，我们对创始人模式知之甚少这一事实反而是一个令人鼓舞的想法。看看创始人们已经取得的成就，而他们是在不良建议的逆风中取得这些成就的。想象一下，一旦我们能告诉他们如何像 Steve Jobs 而不是 John Sculley 那样经营公司，他们会做出什么样的成就。

注释

[1] 表达这个观点的更外交的方式是说，有经验的 C 级高管往往非常擅长向上管理。我认为，任何了解这个领域的人都不会对此有异议。

[2] 如果举办这种 retreat 的做法变得如此普遍，以至于那些被政治主导的成熟公司也开始这样做，我们就可以通过受邀者在组织架构图中的平均深度来量化公司的衰老程度。

[3] 我还有另一个不那么乐观的预测：一旦创始人模式的概念确立，人们就会开始滥用它。那些无法授权甚至应该授权的事情的创始人会以创始人模式为借口。或者那些不是创始人的经理人会决定他们应该尝试像创始人一样行事。在某种程度上，这可能会奏效，但当它不奏效时，结果会很混乱；模块化方法至少限制了一个糟糕的 CEO 可能造成的损害。

感谢 Brian Chesky、Patrick Collison、Ron Conway、Jessica Livingston、Elon Musk、Ryan Petersen、Harj Taggar 和 Garry Tan 阅读本文的草稿。

原文：

https://www.paulgraham.com/foundermode.html

Founder Mode

September 2024

At a YC event last week Brian Chesky gave a talk that everyone who was there will remember. Most founders I talked to afterward said it was the best they’d ever heard. Ron Conway, for the first time in his life, forgot to take notes. I’m not going to try to reproduce it here. Instead I want to talk about a question it raised.

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.

The audience at this event included a lot of the most successful founders we’ve funded, and one after another said that the same thing had happened to them. They’d been given the same advice about how to run their companies as they grew, but instead of helping their companies, it had damaged them.

Why was everyone telling these founders the wrong thing? That was the big mystery to me. And after mulling it over for a bit I figured out the answer: what they were being told was how to run a company you hadn’t founded — how to run a company if you’re merely a professional manager. But this m.o. is so much less effective that to founders it feels broken. There are things founders can do that managers can’t, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because it is.

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.

There are as far as I know no books specifically about founder mode. Business schools don’t know it exists. All we have so far are the experiments of individual founders who’ve been figuring it out for themselves. But now that we know what we’re looking for, we can search for it. I hope in a few years founder mode will be as well understood as manager mode. We can already guess at some of the ways it will differ.

The way managers are taught to run companies seems to be like modular design in the sense that you treat subtrees of the org chart as black boxes. You tell your direct reports what to do, and it’s up to them to figure out how. But you don’t get involved in the details of what they do. That would be micromanaging them, which is bad.

Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it’s described that way, doesn’t it? Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.

One theme I noticed both in Brian’s talk and when talking to founders afterward was the idea of being gaslit. Founders feel like they’re being gaslit from both sides — by the people telling them they have to run their companies like managers, and by the people working for them when they do. Usually when everyone around you disagrees with you, your default assumption should be that you’re mistaken. But this is one of the rare exceptions. VCs who haven’t been founders themselves don’t know how founders should run companies, and C-level execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the world. [1]

Whatever founder mode consists of, it’s pretty clear that it’s going to break the principle that the CEO should engage with the company only via his or her direct reports. “Skip-level” meetings will become the norm instead of a practice so unusual that there’s a name for it. And once you abandon that constraint there are a huge number of permutations to choose from.

For example, Steve Jobs used to run an annual retreat for what he considered the 100 most important people at Apple, and these were not the 100 people highest on the org chart. Can you imagine the force of will it would take to do this at the average company? And yet imagine how useful such a thing could be. It could make a big company feel like a startup. Steve presumably wouldn’t have kept having these retreats if they didn’t work. But I’ve never heard of another company doing this. So is it a good idea, or a bad one? We still don’t know. That’s how little we know about founder mode. [2]

Obviously founders can’t keep running a 2000 person company the way they ran it when it had 20. There’s going to have to be some amount of delegation. Where the borders of autonomy end up, and how sharp they are, will probably vary from company to company. They’ll even vary from time to time within the same company, as managers earn trust. So founder mode will be more complicated than manager mode. But it will also work better. We already know that from the examples of individual founders groping their way toward it.

Indeed, another prediction I’ll make about founder mode is that once we figure out what it is, we’ll find that a number of individual founders were already most of the way there — except that in doing what they did they were regarded by many as eccentric or worse. [3]

Curiously enough it’s an encouraging thought that we still know so little about founder mode. Look at what founders have achieved already, and yet they’ve achieved this against a headwind of bad advice. Imagine what they’ll do once we can tell them how to run their companies like Steve Jobs instead of John Sculley.

Notes

[1] The more diplomatic way of phrasing this statement would be to say that experienced C-level execs are often very skilled at managing up. And I don’t think anyone with knowledge of this world would dispute that.

[2] If the practice of having such retreats became so widespread that even mature companies dominated by politics started to do it, we could quantify the senescence of companies by the average depth on the org chart of those invited.

[3] I also have another less optimistic prediction: as soon as the concept of founder mode becomes established, people will start misusing it. Founders who are unable to delegate even things they should will use founder mode as the excuse. Or managers who aren’t founders will decide they should try to act like founders. That may even work, to some extent, but the results will be messy when it doesn’t; the modular approach does at least limit the damage a bad CEO can do.

Thanks to Brian Chesky, Patrick Collison, Ron Conway, Jessica Livingston, Elon Musk, Ryan Petersen, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this.