Founder Mode

September 2024 At a YC event last week Brian Chesky gave a talk that everyone who was there will remember.

2024 年 9 月 在上周的 YC 活动中，布莱恩·切斯基 (Brian Chesky) 发表了一场让在场的每个人都记得的演讲。

Most founders I talked to afterward said it was the best they'd ever heard.

后来我采访过的大多数创始人都说这是他们听过的最好的。

Ron Conway, for the first time in his life, forgot to take notes.

罗恩·康威有生以来第一次忘记做笔记。

I'm not going to try to reproduce it here.

我不会尝试在这里重现它。

Instead I want to talk about a question it raised.

相反，我想谈谈它提出的一个问题。

The theme of Brian's talk was that the conventional wisdom about

布莱恩演讲的主题是，传统观点认为

how to run larger companies is mistaken.

如何经营更大的公司是错误的。

As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised him that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale.

随着 Airbnb 的发展，好心人建议他必须以某种方式经营公司才能扩大规模。

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.

他们的建议可以乐观地概括为“雇用优秀的人才并给他们空间来完成自己的工作”。他听从了这个建议，但结果却是灾难性的。

So he had to figure out a better way on his own, which he did partly by studying how Steve Jobs ran Apple.

因此，他必须自己找出更好的方法，他通过研究史蒂夫·乔布斯如何管理苹果公司来做到这一点。

So far it seems to be working.

到目前为止，它似乎正在发挥作用。

Airbnb's

爱彼迎的

free cash flow margin is now among the best in Silicon Valley.

自由现金流利润率目前在硅谷名列前茅。

The audience at this event included a lot of the most successful founders we've funded, and one after another said that the same thing had happened to them.

这次活动的观众包括很多我们资助过的最成功的创始人，纷纷表示同样的事情也发生在他们身上。

They'd been given the same advice about how to run their companies as they grew, but instead of helping their companies, it had damaged them.

他们在公司成长过程中得到了同样的关于如何经营公司的建议，但这不但没有帮助他们的公司，反而损害了他们。

Why was everyone telling these founders the wrong thing?

为什么每个人都告诉这些创始人错误的事情？

That was

那是

the big mystery to me.

对我来说这是一个很大的谜团。

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.

经过一番思考，我找到了答案：他们被告知的是如何经营一家不是你创办的公司——如果你只是一名职业经理人，如何经营一家公司。

But this m.o.

但这个妈妈。

is so much less effective that to founders it feels broken.

效率低得多，以至于对创始人来说感觉很糟糕。

There are things founders can do that managers can't, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because it is.

有些事情创始人可以做而管理者却做不到，而且不做这些事情对创始人来说是错误的，因为事实确实如此。

In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode.

实际上，有两种不同的公司经营方式：创始人模式和经理模式。

Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode.

到目前为止，即使是在硅谷，大多数人也隐含地认为，扩大初创公司规模意味着切换到经理模式。

But we can infer the existence of another mode from the dismay of founders who've tried it, and the success of their attempts to escape from it.

但我们可以从尝试过这种模式的创始人的沮丧以及他们尝试摆脱这种模式的成功来推断另一种模式的存在。

There are as far as I know no books specifically about founder mode.

据我所知，还没有专门关于创始人模式的书籍。

Business schools don't know it exists.

商学院不知道它的存在。

All we have so far are the experiments of individual founders who've been figuring it out for themselves.

到目前为止，我们所拥有的只是个别创始人的实验，他们一直在自己解决这个问题。

But now that we know what we're looking for, we can search for it.

但现在我们知道我们要寻找什么，我们就可以搜索它了。

I hope in a few years founder mode will be as well understood as manager mode.

我希望几年后创始人模式能够像管理者模式一样被理解。

We can already guess at some of the ways it will differ.

我们已经可以猜测它会有一些不同。

The way managers are taught to run companies seems to be like modular

管理者被教导如何经营公司的方式似乎是模块化的

design in the sense that you treat subtrees of the org chart as black boxes.

设计的意义是将组织结构图的子树视为黑匣子。

You tell your direct reports what to do, and it's up to them to figure out how.

你告诉你的直接下属要做什么，然后由他们来决定如何做。

But you don't get involved in the details of what they do.

但你不会参与他们所做的事情的细节。

That would be micromanaging them, which is bad.

这将是对他们进行微观管理，这很糟糕。

Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs.

雇用优秀的人才并为他们提供完成工作的空间。

Sounds great when it's described that way, doesn't it?

这样描述听起来很棒，不是吗？

Except in practice, judging

除了在实践中判断

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.

从一个又一个创始人的报告来看，这往往意味着：雇佣专业的造假者，让他们把公司搞垮。

One theme I noticed both in Brian's talk and when talking to founders afterward was the idea of being gaslit.

我在布莱恩的演讲以及之后与创始人交谈时注意到的一个主题是煤气灯的想法。

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

创始人觉得他们受到了来自双方的压力——人们告诉他们必须像经理一样经营公司，而工作人员则让他们感到沮丧。

for them when they do.

当他们这样做的时候。

Usually when everyone around you disagrees with you, your default assumption should be that you're mistaken.

通常，当你周围的每个人都不同意你的观点时，你的默认假设应该是你错了。

But this is one of the rare exceptions.

但这是罕见的例外之一。

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.

自己没有当过创始人的风险投资人不知道创始人应该如何经营公司，而C级高管作为一个阶层，包括一些世界上最熟练的骗子。

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