Quote of the Week
Quality is much better than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles. – Steve Jobs
Music of the Week
Scandinavian Jazz was put on my radar from Daniel Silva’s latest Gabriel Allons’ latest book A Death in Cornwall: A Novel (a fantastic book by the way). The playlist is a “compilation of mellow and melodic jazz songs from Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Iceland.
Article of the Week
Paul Graham’s latest article Founder Mode is enlightening, fantastic, and spot-on as usual. Some of my favorite parts of the article are:
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Video of the Week
How to Live A Fulfilling Life by author Robert Greene is beautiful in its simplicity. Living a life that is fulfilling is what we’re all after. Big thanks to Greene for posting this encouraging video.
Podcast of the Week
Li Lu, Esteé Lauder, Robert Kierlin: Founder of Fastenal, The Russian Rockefellers: The Noble Family Dynasty, and I had dinner with John Mackey Founder of Whole Foods are recent episodes I enjoyed from one of my favorite podcasts called Founders. The amount of business lessons you can learn from these episodes is truly astounding.
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