I lack the time to fully dissect "Founder Mode," so here's a summary…
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I lack the time to fully dissect "Founder Mode," so here's a summary…
After Web 1.0, Silicon Valley focused on flipping companies as quick as possible. The motto was "grow big, fast." Like, Netscape IPO'd 16 months after it was founded.
Then Silicon Valley decided it was smart to be as big as Google when you IPO. Except scaling to thousands of employees in a few years is a recipe for disaster.
VCs will use Founder Mode to justify smaller teams, but it's mostly a reaction to the market.
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Paul Graham is the Malcom Gladwell of tech. He starts with an idea that people mostly agree with ("Middle managers are bad"), offers insights so vague as to be useless ("but sometimes you need managers"), all in service of a story he wants to tell.
Gladwell is mostly guilty of embellishing details to tell a good story, but Graham is always pushing an agenda. Sometimes it's about money. Sometimes it's about his ego.
His agenda constrains his essays to "airport book" level writing.