It’s awesome that you’ve been sharing insights on your UA-cam channel, Theo! Your discussion about Founder Mode and the deep dive into Paul Graham’s essay was engaging and thought-provoking. I appreciate how you break down complex concepts into digestible pieces, making them accessible for aspiring founders. Looking forward to more of your content-it’s inspiring and motivating! Keep up the great work!
Well... there is clearly some great advice in here... but a flag for me is that, when I think of the worst, most toxic bosses I've ever had... I think if they saw your video they would think "yeah; I was right about this; everyone else was wrong!" It is really easy to argue for the grindcore micromanagement -- it's romantic, and it's self-aggrandizing for the individuals with the most hard-power in an organization. But you only devote a few passing words to that footnote [3] about the cautionary tale. A good discourse on founder mode would be about how to find a middle path. Another flag is when you give the example of the intern with founder mindset... why not call the thing "intern mode" then? and say "founders should adopt more of an intern mindset"? You could make the argument just as well -- the fact that you take sales calls and value support, this is the founder doing the grunt work, isn't it? so then it's not founder mode at all. You're simply selecting good qualities and assigning them to the most privileged social category in the system. It makes sense if your audience is a bunch of aspiring founders, but then you are playing into their biases and making it more likely that they will become the kinds of CEOs who the departments need protection from.
This! Love how you call out the biggest thing that annoys me about founder mode: the pedestal founders put themselves on, sometimes. I'm a serial entrepreneur myself, but in the end I've spent nights improving the code base and so did someone else, out of fun, ownership or serving the team. I wouldn't have turned around to him and say: you got founder energy, they even would've embarrassed if I called out the late work on a Friday night to the rest of the team. It's just pure love of your job, discretionary energy, hyper employee engagement... The reason why I do love building early stage companies, is because of my love of building things and not the founder badge. Loved this, thanks so much.
This is an amazing video - Might disagree with some of your other takes, but this one here is golden. Would love to hear more of your takes about running a company and being a founder. What better way to bring the future of people knowing about "founder-mode" than to talk about it!
It's a really good video but I think the examples given mix up two things. If you dont own the thing you are not a founder and you are not in founder mode, you are in self-exploitation-mode. Sure, going the extra-mile this hard is a good indicator that you might make a great founder, but unless you actually own the thing you are not in founder mode. Saying it now because this is 100% how this term will be twisted by corporate/consultant/VC-speak (if it catches on)
Also, Founder sounds like a newfangled way to say "I have a startup" and Founder Mode is just "Startup Culture". Unless I'm missing something this whole thing is a rehash of the 2010 Silicon-Valley-hype around startups. Saying "I have a startup" is now the same as saying "I have a podcast", so a new term is needed to encourage people to work themselves to death for someone elses profit.
Your amount of Founder Mode-ness should be proportional to the equity you have. PG and his ilk make money from the steady stream of tech kiddies playing startup Powerball, eager to get those nice labels like "founder mode" to validate their sense of self.
"Test driven development is a skill that qualifies you out of ever working near me" is such a wild thing to say. You realize that people can have a skill that they don't need to apply in every context? And putting it in the same category as "lying as a skill" just makes you sound needlessly hyperbolic. I get that exaggerating for content and engagement is a thing, but doesn't that just put you in the category of "liar as a skill"?
Yes, it was a bit of a contradiction compared to his other comments. Ah, well, he will come around one day. We TDD Warriors are a patient folk after all :) It's not like that comment is our first rodeo, lols. We actually get it from "founder mode" and "manager mode" alike, don't we.
I always recommend devs to try TDD. Our process do not require it, but learning it makes you a better dev The normal workflow of a dev is like this 1. Code 2. Manual check 3. Repeat 1 & 2 until you’re happy 4. Write tests This is why most devs think that tests slow things down. What they dont realize is that it’s supposed to be 1. Code 2. Write tests 3. Repeat 1 & 2 until you’re happy 4. Manually test to sanity check This 2nd approach is way faster. You can interchange 2 & 1 and you get TDD. But the true value is the speed of verification Another common misconception about TDD is that it’s only for unit testing. Once you’re not limited to “unit” testing, TDD will blow your mind
'We had a lot in common: An orange cat siting on our shoulders :DDD 😼' Depth of experience and perspective on underwater currents when building a startup is breathtaking! You give a selfless advice for the sake of helping people to build new startups! YCombinator for the win! As you said in other videos, world will see an huge increase in small specialized companies catering products to the needs of very specifc tech-niche customers!
Some of the most successful founders I know, including YC founders like Sam Altman, give the exact opposite advice: if you aren’t passionate find something you are passionate about I can’t buy this “do what you hate” take
What he means is do what you hate in what you love. Even the smallest startups or companies have tasks that the owner would not like to do even though the company itself is doing something the owner is very excited about. In that instance rather than doing what he likes within the company he should do what he do does not like meaning what he does not understand. If you like and understand all parts of the company and all the processes, your odds of having a successful company will go up because there is nothing in your company you don't understand at a deep level because you went ahead and learned it.
They aren't incompatible. To find what your startup is about, find what you are passionate about, but then when you split the tasks, don't shy away from what you dislike, do it.
First comment Theo, stumbled across your channel about a month ago. This video and commentary are spot-on. I've been involved with a half-dozen startups with the gamut of success, but never participated much on the equity side due to that "talk to you, promise you the moon, then rug-pull when they see personal gain for themselves." Acrobat Forms? I created the first scripting package in Acrobat 3. The creators of that startup designed the company around my tech. I also told Warnock they should sell advert space on the splash screen for Acro Reader revenue. When Adobe showed interest in our products and servicez, I was shown the door. Then they sat on their million and sold no more services. Adobe shut it down. Lots of other examples. I'm a serial patenter and idea creator. You are the first person with the tech background and startup experience to air out what I have seen again and again. Congrats on the clarity and, frankly, bluntness of this video. And I WILL take you up on the Twitter two sentence DM. But it may be in a couple weeks. Neck deep in projects and bill paying and life crises and .... :)
Banger video. Can't go full Founder mode just yet coz just got my first job, but it's definitely a far better mindset to stick with than mindless drone work.
Don't be shy about applying it at the level you're at! The Discord intern is a great example. Yeah, it does come with risks and it can intimidate less capable folks. It can also get you promoted and fast tracked under the right people though. I've seen it unfold both ways.
Hire for the things you love to do to force yourself to focus on the things you don’t want to do is such great advice. It’s literally all about forcing founders to be good at the things they have weakness in (sale or product) and forcing them the be good at both/all. YCombinator is so good a grooming.
Huh, I usually dont care about founder/managerial stuff, but what you said about doing the things you avoid and hire for things you love is actually pretty profound. Gotta think that over a couple of times, because it feels like it applies beyond hiring decisions...
Your advice of "offload what you love/are passionate about and get good at what you suck at"... It's so counter-intuitive. But it makes a lot of sense. I'm a coder that prefers to just stick to coding, but I couldn't market for the life of me. But anyone I hired to do the marketing just didn't get it or care as much as I did about the product. I'll have to try this out.
You see, you're supposed to hire good people and let them do their jobs. What these people did is hire bad managers and let them waste time and money. It's apparently a subtle difference requiring a whole new mindset to get past
22:45 RE: People who reported issues and saw them get fixed retained better than those that had no issues. Maybe those that were invested enough in the tool to make the effort to report things would have retained better regardless. Those that reported no issues and lapsed had the same issues but didn't report them because they were not invested.
Great review of this article Theo! Some great takeaways. FWIW I recommend you let your videos trail for another 10 seconds to give folks time to hit the like button. Love your channel BTW. HTHs 😊
My company failed because of most reasons discussed here. Manager mode pressure. Gaslighting. Engineers hiding. Saying things were measured tested and in spec but not actually properly characterized managerial insecurities... founder mode 100%. I raised 11M in total, personally built the prototype, and shipped a broken product on time and spent 6 months and 1M to find and fix a bug in a network stack that could have been found had the team spent 1 entire day running the test I ordered and not lied to my face about the results because it would have unnecessarily wasted a whole day of dev due to taking servers offline to reconfigure them to match production (required physical access and could only happen when the network cards approached max throughput causing the application's buffer to unnecessarily reallocate...actual cause was premature buffer size optimization for minimum server latency... ie buffer too small app optimized for conditions not see during normal operating conditions... dev servers couldnt push packets as fast as several $100k router unless you installed and configured a 100k server for real time operation... ie the application's standard operating conditions)... happened 8yrs ago and I'm still not over it. I'm furious.
This entire video is a banger. (If you are looking at my watch metrics and see like 0% of the video watched, i watch on my work computer and comment on my personal device)
Good to know that I'll never get hired by Theo because I'm good at teaching teams how to do improve software with TDD :) Great talk though. Really enjoyed it. On the issue of simpler communication, I have worked with a LOT of people where English is their second language. Over the years, I've tuned my language to be much simpler and succinct in order to make it easier of people translating to their native language in their heads. Let me tell you that is hard for an Aussie because we use so much slang in every-day conversation (so much so, that we've almost forgotten how to speak without it).
Graham's book 'ANSI Common Lisp' was one of the books I read in my second year of college. I had absolutely no idea that Graham was only 35 at that time. I pictured him (and the book) to be much older, and so I was surprised to learn today that he's still such a force, and active as a venture capitalist, too!
PG is survivor bias in action. He has literally no idea what makes for success - he was in the right place at the right time. So what if he writes nicely.
The chatter that said "the man ships" at the end has got to be kidding. Maybe in the past, but these days it's a bunch of delays, many of which ending up leading to vaporware.
Founder mode isnt about doing free work, founder mode is about finding ways to make profit. Theo I think you sometimes mistaken developer mode vs founder mode
Thank you for the detailed video, but it seems you're distorting the meaning of the article to suit your perspective. 'Founder mode' doesn't mean that an intern can bypass procedures and fix everything. It might work in some cases, but not for every situation. In 'founder mode,' you fix issues quickly, iterate, and take responsibility. Over time, you establish rules and processes to improve things. If something isn’t working, you revisit those processes and update them as needed. Eventually, these become part of the company’s and engineers’ expertise. As the work scales, you remain responsible, but you trust the processes because you’ve built them along the way.
The thing is, there are provable instances for many of these companies where their judgment of "good people" was miles off target. Perhaps it is better to criticise this advice not because hiring good people is a bad plan, but rather, acknowledging that some founders' ability to identify good personnel is no where near as good as their nose for a good idea or their ability to execute on that idea. The other thing to consider is at what stage of career/ambition should these hires be at? If a founder, who wants to maintain their vision for the company, hires a very good, very experienced executive, dollars to donuts they are going to clash, because their visions will differ. Someone less experienced, but capable, might be more open to following the founder's vision. This of course obligates the founder to act as a mentor to the layer immediately below them, something they may not actually be good at. Scaling is hard, go figure.
19:40 That sentence literally has a latin expression in it. I dont know if that was the best sentence to highlight the simplicity of his language. I dont even know how to spell modus operandi.
This was really weird to listen to. I've been feeling pretty down about my job recently, without anything concrete to point to, and this article made many points that resonated with my situation. I'm just a common (and "easily replaceable" as my manager likes to remind me) rank-and-file employee working in the code mines, but this still gave me food for thoughts. Thanks for highlighting this article, Theo!
I watch a lot of shark tank and dragons den. And yea I know it's TV so probably skewed in some ways. But I get the idea of most of the time investors are just in a "nope" kind of state and then justify it to not seem like an butthole. Sometimes you get good advice from them on that show but often the reasons are made up.
Paul's site works perfectly fine for mobile...? No clutter, and just content. Dare I say it is perfect? For desktop, the site is even better, as everything is left-aligned and not centered. I absolutely hate that trend.
Poor Theo, you do know Y combinator is also an investor right? They have different profit motive than other VCs because their strategy isn’t big rounds, but still similar. The motive of other founders sharing and talking is cool, but most successful founders are very cutthroat and will not really help others since they rather others help them instead. Oh wait, Theo is also an investor, he is in investor mode no wonder some part of video sounds off to me.
@@HolidayInGuantanamo Reddit doesn’t benefit from them, they just started over there and have started spreading to other corners of the internet. It’s designed to look like a natural conversation with a name drop where other people then also respond with how great said person/thing is, then finally somewhere down the line someone asks where to see said person/thing and someone gives a link. On YT it’s much harder to see this is a scam as you can’t just inspect someone’s comment history - but on Reddit you can - and when you do you see that these bots have played out the same conversation hundreds of times in every popular thread they can. The name pattern bots use has stayed constant though, and once you see it you can’t not see them everywhere.
You describing founder mode is just another way of saying "hey maybe managers should actually know how to do the job of the people they're managing." The rest of us have been saying this for a hundred years. Maybe we shouldn't give every moron with an idea millions of dollars if they can't execute it alone. I'm sure lots of other people have that same idea as them.
The segment from yesterday's All-In Podcast episode on this topic is an interesting counter perspective to this video. TLDR: Founder mode is largely an over simplistic idea, is not new by any means given there are several books written on this topic, and PG ad YC continue to push the message that they're the only investors who are founder friendly and everyone else is anti-founder as their marketing scheme, when in reality the founders have had the power for the last 20 years since VCs like Founders Fund and A16z were created
@@richardantao3249 literally all of it. The “PG and YC continue to push…” bit is hilariously misread and a self own on their part for thinking that lmao
This post annoyed me so much, founder mode is just 'don't be an idiot and blindly hire grifters then give them the keys to the kingdom or your company will blow up' i assume im missing something but manager mode is great if you're great at finding talent and founder mode is great if you're great at working closely with a small team, both suck if you aren't good at them
To the other comments here complaining about Theo, PSA, you don’t have to watch! I enjoy his content and the value of staying up on tech for my future career. No doubt watching Theo has made me a better engineer.
@@hiagooliveira6510 yea I like his content that’s a lot more educational where he’s making graphs and shit. But a lot of these articles I’ve already seen from circulation in the dev Twitter sphere
It’s awesome that you’ve been sharing insights on your UA-cam channel, Theo! Your discussion about Founder Mode and the deep dive into Paul Graham’s essay was engaging and thought-provoking. I appreciate how you break down complex concepts into digestible pieces, making them accessible for aspiring founders. Looking forward to more of your content-it’s inspiring and motivating! Keep up the great work!
It's not a cliffnote unless it comes from the cliff region of France. Otherwise it's just sparkling footer commentary.
LMAO
Well... there is clearly some great advice in here... but a flag for me is that, when I think of the worst, most toxic bosses I've ever had... I think if they saw your video they would think "yeah; I was right about this; everyone else was wrong!" It is really easy to argue for the grindcore micromanagement -- it's romantic, and it's self-aggrandizing for the individuals with the most hard-power in an organization. But you only devote a few passing words to that footnote [3] about the cautionary tale. A good discourse on founder mode would be about how to find a middle path.
Another flag is when you give the example of the intern with founder mindset... why not call the thing "intern mode" then? and say "founders should adopt more of an intern mindset"? You could make the argument just as well -- the fact that you take sales calls and value support, this is the founder doing the grunt work, isn't it? so then it's not founder mode at all. You're simply selecting good qualities and assigning them to the most privileged social category in the system. It makes sense if your audience is a bunch of aspiring founders, but then you are playing into their biases and making it more likely that they will become the kinds of CEOs who the departments need protection from.
This! Love how you call out the biggest thing that annoys me about founder mode: the pedestal founders put themselves on, sometimes. I'm a serial entrepreneur myself, but in the end I've spent nights improving the code base and so did someone else, out of fun, ownership or serving the team. I wouldn't have turned around to him and say: you got founder energy, they even would've embarrassed if I called out the late work on a Friday night to the rest of the team. It's just pure love of your job, discretionary energy, hyper employee engagement... The reason why I do love building early stage companies, is because of my love of building things and not the founder badge.
Loved this, thanks so much.
This is an amazing video - Might disagree with some of your other takes, but this one here is golden. Would love to hear more of your takes about running a company and being a founder. What better way to bring the future of people knowing about "founder-mode" than to talk about it!
Me when I’m in a “make the most stank ugly ass website of all time” contest and my competition is Paul Graham: 🗿
Paul Graham? Try Berkshire Hathaway 🗿🗿🗿
It's a really good video but I think the examples given mix up two things. If you dont own the thing you are not a founder and you are not in founder mode, you are in self-exploitation-mode. Sure, going the extra-mile this hard is a good indicator that you might make a great founder, but unless you actually own the thing you are not in founder mode. Saying it now because this is 100% how this term will be twisted by corporate/consultant/VC-speak (if it catches on)
Also, Founder sounds like a newfangled way to say "I have a startup" and Founder Mode is just "Startup Culture". Unless I'm missing something this whole thing is a rehash of the 2010 Silicon-Valley-hype around startups. Saying "I have a startup" is now the same as saying "I have a podcast", so a new term is needed to encourage people to work themselves to death for someone elses profit.
Your amount of Founder Mode-ness should be proportional to the equity you have. PG and his ilk make money from the steady stream of tech kiddies playing startup Powerball, eager to get those nice labels like "founder mode" to validate their sense of self.
"Test driven development is a skill that qualifies you out of ever working near me" is such a wild thing to say. You realize that people can have a skill that they don't need to apply in every context? And putting it in the same category as "lying as a skill" just makes you sound needlessly hyperbolic. I get that exaggerating for content and engagement is a thing, but doesn't that just put you in the category of "liar as a skill"?
Yes, it was a bit of a contradiction compared to his other comments. Ah, well, he will come around one day. We TDD Warriors are a patient folk after all :) It's not like that comment is our first rodeo, lols. We actually get it from "founder mode" and "manager mode" alike, don't we.
I'm not even a big TDD advocate. It's just weird to disqualify someone based on experience with a methodology you don't personally apply.
@@MachineYearningTDD is a waste of time and implies that the entire project has been planned by someone else rather than the person being hired
@@poetryflynn3712 Sounds like you just don't know how to write tests.
I always recommend devs to try TDD. Our process do not require it, but learning it makes you a better dev
The normal workflow of a dev is like this
1. Code
2. Manual check
3. Repeat 1 & 2 until you’re happy
4. Write tests
This is why most devs think that tests slow things down. What they dont realize is that it’s supposed to be
1. Code
2. Write tests
3. Repeat 1 & 2 until you’re happy
4. Manually test to sanity check
This 2nd approach is way faster. You can interchange 2 & 1 and you get TDD. But the true value is the speed of verification
Another common misconception about TDD is that it’s only for unit testing. Once you’re not limited to “unit” testing, TDD will blow your mind
'We had a lot in common: An orange cat siting on our shoulders :DDD 😼'
Depth of experience and perspective on underwater currents when building a startup is breathtaking!
You give a selfless advice for the sake of helping people to build new startups! YCombinator for the win!
As you said in other videos, world will see an huge increase in small specialized companies catering products to the needs of very specifc tech-niche customers!
This is why I love Theo. Don’t always agree with but love that he is also a founder and not just an employee type.
@@Viviko that’s why i subscribed to his channel. Imagine my surprise when i found out it’s a react channel 😅
Some of the most successful founders I know, including YC founders like Sam Altman, give the exact opposite advice: if you aren’t passionate find something you are passionate about
I can’t buy this “do what you hate” take
What he means is do what you hate in what you love. Even the smallest startups or companies have tasks that the owner would not like to do even though the company itself is doing something the owner is very excited about. In that instance rather than doing what he likes within the company he should do what he do does not like meaning what he does not understand. If you like and understand all parts of the company and all the processes, your odds of having a successful company will go up because there is nothing in your company you don't understand at a deep level because you went ahead and learned it.
They aren't incompatible. To find what your startup is about, find what you are passionate about, but then when you split the tasks, don't shy away from what you dislike, do it.
Altman is not a good example of anything, lmao. dude is a scam artist.
First comment Theo, stumbled across your channel about a month ago. This video and commentary are spot-on. I've been involved with a half-dozen startups with the gamut of success, but never participated much on the equity side due to that "talk to you, promise you the moon, then rug-pull when they see personal gain for themselves." Acrobat Forms? I created the first scripting package in Acrobat 3. The creators of that startup designed the company around my tech. I also told Warnock they should sell advert space on the splash screen for Acro Reader revenue. When Adobe showed interest in our products and servicez, I was shown the door. Then they sat on their million and sold no more services. Adobe shut it down.
Lots of other examples. I'm a serial patenter and idea creator. You are the first person with the tech background and startup experience to air out what I have seen again and again.
Congrats on the clarity and, frankly, bluntness of this video.
And I WILL take you up on the Twitter two sentence DM. But it may be in a couple weeks. Neck deep in projects and bill paying and life crises and .... :)
I feel like we need Guilfoyle Mode... make it a thing people
Banger video. Can't go full Founder mode just yet coz just got my first job, but it's definitely a far better mindset to stick with than mindless drone work.
Don't be shy about applying it at the level you're at! The Discord intern is a great example. Yeah, it does come with risks and it can intimidate less capable folks. It can also get you promoted and fast tracked under the right people though. I've seen it unfold both ways.
Thank you for posting about this Theo (as well as the YC/VC rant/discussion on your other channel). I really enjoy this kind of content :)
Hire for the things you love to do to force yourself to focus on the things you don’t want to do is such great advice.
It’s literally all about forcing founders to be good at the things they have weakness in (sale or product) and forcing them the be good at both/all. YCombinator is so good a grooming.
Huh, I usually dont care about founder/managerial stuff, but what you said about doing the things you avoid and hire for things you love is actually pretty profound. Gotta think that over a couple of times, because it feels like it applies beyond hiring decisions...
Your advice of "offload what you love/are passionate about and get good at what you suck at"... It's so counter-intuitive. But it makes a lot of sense. I'm a coder that prefers to just stick to coding, but I couldn't market for the life of me. But anyone I hired to do the marketing just didn't get it or care as much as I did about the product. I'll have to try this out.
best video yet... love the energy
You see, you're supposed to hire good people and let them do their jobs. What these people did is hire bad managers and let them waste time and money. It's apparently a subtle difference requiring a whole new mindset to get past
So glad that someone of your stature gets to deliver this.
22:45 RE: People who reported issues and saw them get fixed retained better than those that had no issues.
Maybe those that were invested enough in the tool to make the effort to report things would have retained better regardless. Those that reported no issues and lapsed had the same issues but didn't report them because they were not invested.
Great review of this article Theo! Some great takeaways. FWIW I recommend you let your videos trail for another 10 seconds to give folks time to hit the like button. Love your channel BTW. HTHs 😊
My company failed because of most reasons discussed here. Manager mode pressure. Gaslighting. Engineers hiding. Saying things were measured tested and in spec but not actually properly characterized managerial insecurities... founder mode 100%. I raised 11M in total, personally built the prototype, and shipped a broken product on time and spent 6 months and 1M to find and fix a bug in a network stack that could have been found had the team spent 1 entire day running the test I ordered and not lied to my face about the results because it would have unnecessarily wasted a whole day of dev due to taking servers offline to reconfigure them to match production (required physical access and could only happen when the network cards approached max throughput causing the application's buffer to unnecessarily reallocate...actual cause was premature buffer size optimization for minimum server latency... ie buffer too small app optimized for conditions not see during normal operating conditions... dev servers couldnt push packets as fast as several $100k router unless you installed and configured a 100k server for real time operation... ie the application's standard operating conditions)... happened 8yrs ago and I'm still not over it. I'm furious.
This entire video is a banger.
(If you are looking at my watch metrics and see like 0% of the video watched, i watch on my work computer and comment on my personal device)
Lovely video. I wonder what other 'modes' there are out there that it would be good to have names for. (Maybe 'burn-out mode' would be one.)
Oh man, "Those who can build, build. Those who can't build, invest." Gotta make a t-shirt out of that! 😂
Good to know that I'll never get hired by Theo because I'm good at teaching teams how to do improve software with TDD :)
Great talk though. Really enjoyed it. On the issue of simpler communication, I have worked with a LOT of people where English is their second language. Over the years, I've tuned my language to be much simpler and succinct in order to make it easier of people translating to their native language in their heads. Let me tell you that is hard for an Aussie because we use so much slang in every-day conversation (so much so, that we've almost forgotten how to speak without it).
BIG BIG BIGGGGG video, love this being posted in the main channel
Graham's book 'ANSI Common Lisp' was one of the books I read in my second year of college. I had absolutely no idea that Graham was only 35 at that time. I pictured him (and the book) to be much older, and so I was surprised to learn today that he's still such a force, and active as a venture capitalist, too!
I’m legally blind, and a few months back I encountered a similar bug, and I found them similarly responsive. Maybe it was the same guy!
Best video you ever made.
this was a great video. Solid takes
i like Paul Graham's website great articles on there
PG is survivor bias in action. He has literally no idea what makes for success - he was in the right place at the right time. So what if he writes nicely.
Awesome video. This got me pumped
Achromatic dev for the best SaaS starter kit. Let's goo!
thank you so much, now i can say what i am working on.
The chatter that said "the man ships" at the end has got to be kidding. Maybe in the past, but these days it's a bunch of delays, many of which ending up leading to vaporware.
I see “the man ships” and my mind translates it to “this guy fucks”
so investing is about gut feeling. Got it!
I'm no fan of Apple, but huge respect for Steve Jobs, who very much did "think different". As far as I'm concerned the company died with him.
Founder Mode is super amazing
every couple of years they come up with a new term for an old concept and people use it like little kids learning new slang.
Founder mode isnt about doing free work, founder mode is about finding ways to make profit. Theo I think you sometimes mistaken developer mode vs founder mode
Thank you for the detailed video, but it seems you're distorting the meaning of the article to suit your perspective. 'Founder mode' doesn't mean that an intern can bypass procedures and fix everything. It might work in some cases, but not for every situation.
In 'founder mode,' you fix issues quickly, iterate, and take responsibility. Over time, you establish rules and processes to improve things. If something isn’t working, you revisit those processes and update them as needed. Eventually, these become part of the company’s and engineers’ expertise. As the work scales, you remain responsible, but you trust the processes because you’ve built them along the way.
sick edit
28:55 "[...] managers are taught to [...] treat subtress of the org chart as black boxes."
i think you re-marketed "extreme ownership" as "founder mode"
So Germany is just an entire country in Manager Mode 😢
Hahahahaha, you're so mean!
You're 100% spot on about Discord.
The thing is, there are provable instances for many of these companies where their judgment of "good people" was miles off target. Perhaps it is better to criticise this advice not because hiring good people is a bad plan, but rather, acknowledging that some founders' ability to identify good personnel is no where near as good as their nose for a good idea or their ability to execute on that idea.
The other thing to consider is at what stage of career/ambition should these hires be at? If a founder, who wants to maintain their vision for the company, hires a very good, very experienced executive, dollars to donuts they are going to clash, because their visions will differ. Someone less experienced, but capable, might be more open to following the founder's vision. This of course obligates the founder to act as a mentor to the layer immediately below them, something they may not actually be good at. Scaling is hard, go figure.
19:40 That sentence literally has a latin expression in it. I dont know if that was the best sentence to highlight the simplicity of his language. I dont even know how to spell modus operandi.
This was really weird to listen to. I've been feeling pretty down about my job recently, without anything concrete to point to, and this article made many points that resonated with my situation. I'm just a common (and "easily replaceable" as my manager likes to remind me) rank-and-file employee working in the code mines, but this still gave me food for thoughts. Thanks for highlighting this article, Theo!
Loved the video
Business schools don’t know it exists because almost no one there is a founder. lol
"We don't have a ticket for that" - losers
Never go full founder-mode.
I watch a lot of shark tank and dragons den. And yea I know it's TV so probably skewed in some ways. But I get the idea of most of the time investors are just in a "nope" kind of state and then justify it to not seem like an butthole. Sometimes you get good advice from them on that show but often the reasons are made up.
Good stuff
Like the take Theo. Thanks for sharing your wrong opinion. Some gold in here.
lol didn't expect this one from u but excited
Paul's site works perfectly fine for mobile...?
No clutter, and just content. Dare I say it is perfect?
For desktop, the site is even better, as everything is left-aligned and not centered. I absolutely hate that trend.
The a11y of the website though 😅
Great vid.
Poor Theo, you do know Y combinator is also an investor right? They have different profit motive than other VCs because their strategy isn’t big rounds, but still similar. The motive of other founders sharing and talking is cool, but most successful founders are very cutthroat and will not really help others since they rather others help them instead. Oh wait, Theo is also an investor, he is in investor mode no wonder some part of video sounds off to me.
omg there are so many bots in the comments section
Yeah, the bots from Reddit are here now. Entire comment chains filled with bots to create mock conversations.
@@Cohors1316Why would they create mock conversations? How does Reddit benefit from this?
@@HolidayInGuantanamo Reddit doesn’t benefit from them, they just started over there and have started spreading to other corners of the internet. It’s designed to look like a natural conversation with a name drop where other people then also respond with how great said person/thing is, then finally somewhere down the line someone asks where to see said person/thing and someone gives a link. On YT it’s much harder to see this is a scam as you can’t just inspect someone’s comment history - but on Reddit you can - and when you do you see that these bots have played out the same conversation hundreds of times in every popular thread they can. The name pattern bots use has stayed constant though, and once you see it you can’t not see them everywhere.
You describing founder mode is just another way of saying "hey maybe managers should actually know how to do the job of the people they're managing." The rest of us have been saying this for a hundred years. Maybe we shouldn't give every moron with an idea millions of dollars if they can't execute it alone. I'm sure lots of other people have that same idea as them.
theo is the founder male
Lol apparently the answer is founder mode = michael scott ua-cam.com/video/ndw-SvkHrDo/v-deo.html&ab_channel=TheHitenShow
elon musk is NOT a founder
Before the bot comments got deleted >>>
The segment from yesterday's All-In Podcast episode on this topic is an interesting counter perspective to this video.
TLDR: Founder mode is largely an over simplistic idea, is not new by any means given there are several books written on this topic, and PG ad YC continue to push the message that they're the only investors who are founder friendly and everyone else is anti-founder as their marketing scheme, when in reality the founders have had the power for the last 20 years since VCs like Founders Fund and A16z were created
I don't think any one piece of media has rotted brains of founders as effectively as the All In podcast
@@t3dotgg might not be for everyone. Nonetheless, which of the points that I stated above is incorrect?
@@richardantao3249 literally all of it. The “PG and YC continue to push…” bit is hilariously misread and a self own on their part for thinking that lmao
Why so toxic for Theo comments.
People race here to.... complain.
Bro your falling off if your in such a rush to complain.
fire
if youtuber were concise then most of the videos end in less than 2 mins
Need long videos for the sweet sweet ad revenue
This post annoyed me so much, founder mode is just 'don't be an idiot and blindly hire grifters then give them the keys to the kingdom or your company will blow up' i assume im missing something but manager mode is great if you're great at finding talent and founder mode is great if you're great at working closely with a small team, both suck if you aren't good at them
Awesome 2nd tangent
Theo has a bad hair life
bot
Did we just discover agile for the second time?
14 views in 0 minutes, theo really fell off
I was a fan, rarely make it past 10 minutes anymore. content is just not for me anymore.
@@100timezcooler The only channel I have notifications for is USCSB. I just randomly got lucky and decided to open UA-cam when theo uploaded.
All he does is read posts and give his takes, it’s stupid content
To the other comments here complaining about Theo, PSA, you don’t have to watch! I enjoy his content and the value of staying up on tech for my future career. No doubt watching Theo has made me a better engineer.
@@hiagooliveira6510 yea I like his content that’s a lot more educational where he’s making graphs and shit. But a lot of these articles I’ve already seen from circulation in the dev Twitter sphere
It's not working the reasoning... You hire experts because you are not good or specialised enough in the field.
nah, yc never gets a worse deal what are you talking about...
by your own advice and pauls example. M.O. is Mode of Operation not Modus Operandi lol we arent in ancient Rome anymore
don’t put Elon in the thumbnail, come on. he’s too cringe to deserve it.
god i hate this fakey behavior
40 seconds, 0 views, bro fell off
Theo - ceritifed vercel shill
Loved the video