Founder Mode!
Founder Mode!
I don't know how are you going to take it, but I am writing this as a reflection to Matt. I don't expect him to read this right away, but I am mostly writing for myself as I have this thought process and I don't want to get it to waste. I don't know how many of you know about Y Combinator, YC from now on. It is a primo VC institution, which funded 5000 startups and $600B of combined valuation. Startups at all stages benefit from YC. Some can be a very early stage starup, while others can be 6 years old with a working product like Splinterlands. It is typically a three month program, runs twice a year, where many start ups arrive to pitch their business. Goal of YC is to help startups to take off! YC sort of provides 'traning and group activities' for 11 weeks upto their 'demo day' at the end. YC invests $500K in every company. Some of the very well known ones that went through this program are:
- AirBNB
- Doordash
- Twitch
- Coinbase
CEO of AirBNB Brian Chesky recently gave a talk at one of the YC events. This is where he talked about conventional management style as a company grows from just the Founders and a few workers to 50-100 people. In other words the first phase of growth, something we can relate to in Splinterlands during the last bull run. Conventional management style during this first phase of growth is the general advice:
"hire good people and give them room to do their jobs"
Chesky followed this standard advice to disastrous results at AirBNB. Therefore, fairly quickly he had to find an alternative, and he did that by studying Steve Jobs. So the question: Is that convention advice incorrect?
Well just like everything else in real world business mangement it may or may not be, it depends. That advice is applicable for professional managers, not for founders of a tech company. In many cases, that advice turns into the following:
"hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground."
I have seen this in action from the outside in Splinterlands during the last bull market. The assumption is, as the company scales, you typically like to run it from "founders mode" to "manager mode".
The way managers are trained in management school is to run companies in modular design. 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. Hire great people for a project and let them do it. Do you guys know who said that to me once? Yep, Matt!! LOL.
It sounds good in theory, and perhaps even work in real world at sometimes. However, more often, you end up hiring 'fakers' or good people who turns into 'fakers' and they collectively run their part of the project to the ground, and the same happens to the other module. There goes your modular design!!
The solution seems to be "founder mode" where you skip the middle management and talk directly to the contributor, evaluate his/her work and see if that fits to the goal of the corporation. As you can image this is no easy task. However, Steve Jobs routinely will held offsite with 100 top people at Apple, but they are not top executive, they can be from any level of the company who Steve personally thought are valuable to his goals.
Obviously there must be a balance somewhere. It is impractical to run "Founder Mode" for a 2000 people company. However, it is possible to cut-the-crap even there through an important segment. For example, you don't need to talk to your payroll guy in an international oil exploration company, but you can talk directly to the geologist working on the latest prospect offshore Namibia. You run founder mode in that small segment.
There is a humbling thought out there and it is contrarian. There is always a lot of conventional wisdom and free advice. Usually they are all wrong.
Matt you decide when and where you will need to be in founders mode and when you need to be in manager mode.
Nice
It makes perfect sense, considering everything that's been going on with Splinterlands. Maybe Matt needs to take the reins back and get the ship moving in the right direction. It's like they spent like crazy, burned through a bunch of cash (and Chaos Pack) and are now begging for a handout from DHF? Seriously?
If the game can't sustain itself, maybe they need to rethink the whole model, not just ask for more money. It sounds like a bankrupt state-owned company asking the government for help.
The team admitted many mistakes were made in the past, and since Matt is the captain of the ship, almost a year now, in my opinion things have definitely been changed for the better.
I'm glad to hear that, I hope to see things improving there, I've been in the game since 2018 when I got my first Beta pack.
wow that's a really long time!
Me too
Indeed
I noticed during the last bull a lot of companies grew too quickly too fast and they didn't leave themselves enough runway for when times got like this. Probably another thing you actually consider when you are in the right mode.
Yes. It’s not easy though. Many fall into that trap
Indeed
Good catch
What would be your estimate on the percentage of people hired by companies are either fakers or turn into fakers?
50%
So if there are 161,434,000 people employed in the United States, you're saying that 80 million people are faking their jobs?
In white collar jobs. Yes.
Do you fake your job?
No. But I get the percentage from my workplace:)
Let me ask you back. What would be your perspective.
Haha, fair. So based on your workplace, your advice to Matt is to fire 50% of the Splinterlands team because they're fakers?
Personally I think Founder Mode is just another corporate buzz word that doesn't really mean anything. It's not practical. A founder should probably be an expert in the products, but should they really also be an expert in accounting? Or HR? Legal? Cybersecurity? Marketing?
Paul Graham says Founder Mode works better, but doesn't actually explain what Founder Mode is and gives absolutely no data to back up that claim... it just sounds silly to me. I think hiring is the most important activity in a company, and I think it's important for CEOs, etc, to occasionally meet with people of every level to get a good perspective, but I think ultimately the most important thing is to hire great people and trust that they know their area better than you do.
You got me wrong :)
Matt already is in founder mode and he did fire 50% of the employees.
Trouble is now what?
Founder mode and manager mode are not mutually exclusive. Reality is often complicated. It is the founder who need to figure it out.
There is no wise old man!
Ah, I'm sorry... I thought when you wrote this:
You were essentially asking him to go from Manager Mode to Founder Mode... I didn't realise you were talking historically. Thanks for clarifying.
Cheers! As I said the two modes doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive. Balancing the two is difficult but good CEOs champions that balance frequently
Yes
Good q
Haha
Agreed
I think more
It mostly comes down to great leadership, how the leader / manager can motivate his staff, convert the fakers to workers.
They say "One volunteer is better than 10 pressed men"
Yes I can agree on that. One willing employee is better than 10 unwilling ones
20 willings are better than 10 that are not
Exactly, this insight is valuable
Thank you for the information and for the willingly to share. Though I don't think I understand much about it
Quite informative. I do see the need for founder mode but the con is pretty huge too, especially to the founder.
Spending so long in your job meeting and supervising so many people plus other exclusive founder responsibilities can quickly get tiring 😂
I hear our founder say that a lot. He doesn't particularly like it. He does it for us! I am grateful for that.
You hear well
It's funny. When I was reading this I thought not in crypto then I got the the fakers but and you were well ahead of me 😀😀
From my experience in companies you are right here. There is so much dead wood who are incapable of doing what they are paid for but push all of that on to their minions or obfuscate and distract their superiors with bullshit all the time to look good.
I thought you might like this post.
You know that I work big oil, and we have gone through many rounds of lay offs over the last 15 years. Although the global hydrocarbon demand is increasing, and the production is increasing to keep pace with it, our industries footprint is steadily decreasing in the map of S&P500 in terms of market cap.
To reflect that, our workforce is also steadily declining. So that boils down to we are doing more with less people now. In fact compared to 2007 oil industry employee count, we are currently at 70% less.
Yet, I say we can get rid of more people and still won't see any bad impact. That is the amount of extra fat we have.
Now please don't get me wrong, when we let people go, we tend to let a lot of good people go and keep the bad ones! Why! Because those moron and dim witted management decides who to keep and who to let go. How can you expect them to make the right decision.
The fact that we make any money is rather surprising to me.
The last time we had a purge that was exactly the case. It was voluntary redundancy and they ended up paying a lot to the good people who left and we kept a load of crap time wasters on and everything became harder!
There is always fat to cut, just have to cut in the right places which rarely seems to happen. I will say that right up until they cut me 🤣🤣
You know I am at a stage of life that I am glad I am over it. I don't really care if they cut me or not, it won't have any impact on me financially. I am sure I will miss the adrenaline at work, and honestly that is the reason I am still here.
What that does is a rather detached perspective over my industry. I have been doing this for a long time and know all the ins and outs. Trouble is they have figured out that I know this and not many people!! So they are desperately grabbing on to me!! Its rather funny:)
It's good to know the ins and outs of it all. I think that's why I am safe (unfortunately) because despite my technical skills decreasing a little from lack of use I know everything about how the place works!
One day we shall buy that island in the sun 😀
Some of the Caribbean islands are cheap now :)
You should be able to get it at the price of a London Penthouse
Indeed its good
Dont worry they wont, you are a good worker
You like to purge much?
Lol, Amy. You have a negative rep now so I'm not going to bother with you and your craziness.
Bon voyage 😀
חרא צף בומי חרא צף
.
.
תודה תודה
.
תודה תודה
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
עושה צחוק על המצב הנפשי שלי, תודה רבה מאוד אצילי
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Who is Amy? Are you sf too? Uncle F this is not like you. Please share more youtube oldies and keep flagging, please downvote mister. Boom.
Let them all go, people are useless
אז חשבת
גם אתה דוד פ גם אתה בחבורה של הרעים. חבל
A lot depends on good management. I would pay attention to the capitalization of Splinterlands. The $0.01 SPS price level should be set in stone, investors are looking at the chart. Splinterlands needs to use part of its income to buy back and burn SPS (if the price is below $0.01).
Thats true
Interesting insights
Indeed
During the last bull for splinterlands in 2021 (that's when I started, like many with me) the team wasn't prepared for the growth and hype and mistakes were made, money (a lot) could have been spent better to say the least but I think in the last year since Matt has been running things, it's starting to look better don't you think?
You can better have a small dedicated team that's flexible and have short lines of communication than a really big team, which always will have slackers among them. Of course as always the perfection is somewhere in the middle because there's only so much a small team can do.
None of this can be planned as mostly we deal of impromptu market conditions and responds to that.
None at all
As often it is tha case in life, I think that a balanced approach is almost always the better choice: delegating tasks is mandatory as you grow and become a bigger company, but if you delegate everything and lose contact with what people are doing, trusting what people do (or saying they are doing)... well, when money are involved chances are that you will soon find out that a lot of people aren't worth your trust.
Yes, agree on that.
I also agree
The netflix book "No Rules Rules" about how to run a startup is also interesting in this aspects... I only saw their interview about the book and remember they saying its better to hire a superdev that will do an awsome job, even for a higher salary, than having to hire 3 normal devs that gonna do something average... But a lot of the talk was about culture...
Thank you for mentioning the book. I thought about picking it up many times, but it slipped. I am adding it to my audible.
Thank you for flagging me. Its freedom
I know the team isn't in a phase of growth right now, but having had a peak behind the curtain I can certainly say there are many passionate team members that bring a lot of talent, focus, and drive to their roles. This would fall under the 'hire good people and let them do their jobs' to me, especially as Matt has had to take a more macro role with the company since becoming CEO.
In all fairness, I believe Aggy had that approach as well but the company scaled too fast and too big - and this happened right at the beginning of quite a long bear market.
Once the market turns and we see growth I'll be very curious to see how Matt approaches growing and managing the team. He has the benefit of hindsight and is naturally more conservative so my hope is lessons learned lead to future success.
I am sure you are correct. The management style I described here is theoritical and applicable to conventional start-ups. Even there the two modes I discuss are not mutually exclusive. In real world big industries it is not easy to make a call which mode you should be in and at which given time. If we knew all the answers, it would be easy.
Sure you are
I really like the comparison with Matt as CEO because that founder vision is on point with the present state of the game and even with the community :O
Me too
Dpos for your flags dpos
Keep it up you slave of galen
חזירקון
חזירון
חזירון
This is precisely working as a BDR looking for startups that have an investment round from a VC, to include them in a credit incentive plan in the Cloud. All the big companies, AWS, Google and Azure, have these programs and grant hundreds of thousands of $ to consume in their clouds (including servers). I think it is not a good idea for Splinterland to look for an investment round through a VC, not only because of the fresh money that comes in, but because of the other benefits that are obtained.
I don’t think too many VCs will be interested in SL. We are rather old.