"Hiring good people and letting them do their jobs" turned out to be a disaster at AirBnb. So Brian Chesky decides to run the company like "how Steve Jobs ran Apple", with great results. Now, Paul Graham doesn't elaborate in the essay what "how Steve Jobs ran Apple" means. That could mean any number of things from how Steve made decisions, how Steve ran meetings, how Steve organized Apple under him, and so on. We don't know.
But from the essay, it seems "founder after founder" has struggled with the implementation of "hire good people and let them do their jobs". So is the advice bad or was it implemented poorly? Graham goes with the former, the advice is bad.
Meanwhile, Steve Jobs at the D8 conference effectively saying "hire good people and let them do their jobs":
Here are the key points Steve mentions in the video:
1. "Apple is an incredibly collaborative company...There's tremendous teamwork at the top of the company, which filters down to tremendous teamwork throughout the company. And teamwork is dependent on trusting the other folks to come through with their part without watching them all the time, but trusting that they are going to come through with their parts. And that's what we do well." - In other words, "hire good people and let them do their jobs"!!
2. "If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions." - In other words, "hire good people and let them do their jobs"!!
The other point in the essay is: "There are things founders can do that managers can't, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because it is."
What this is saying really is that a manager can never "care" about everything to the extent to which a founder would, and that is directly reflected in the types of decisions (and risks) or ways of working that a founder is willing to take on that a manager might not.
This can be tricky. Yes, Steve Jobs obsessed over the specific shade of yellow, or pushed teams harder towards a goal than a manager may have. The example Graham gives about Jobs having an offsite of the 100 most important people at Apple, not necessarily following the org chart, is a great example of true meritocracy prevailing over hierarchy.
Such examples where excellence is pursued come hell or high water are good to romanticize founder mode. But Graham's essay has a cautionary footnote that (IMHO anyway) should have been part of the main essay:
"...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..."
So the key question as a startup scales is: how can founders "be good at delegating and managing", and how can managers "care" as much as founders?
What do you think?
