Ben Sandofsky

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.

Sep 4, 2024 at 2:06amWeb
Show threadBen SandofskySep 4, 2024

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.

Show threadGlenn FleishmanSep 4, 2024
@sandofsky his middle name is survivorshipbias
Show threadBruce ElrickSep 4, 2024
@sandofsky
Paul Graham is high on his own supply, simply said.
Show threadFarce MajeureSep 4, 2024
@sandofsky he's way worse than Malcolm Gladwell. Which is no small feat.
Show threadGlyphSep 4, 2024
@vathpela @sandofsky gladwell does work. It’s bad, shoddy, hack work, full of methodological errors and base rate fallacy and all kinds of other nonsense but he does collate sources and do interviews and organize research and such. Graham just goes “fart fart fart” until he hits word count and then publishes another “essay”. No work goes into it, beyond transcribing whatever his own barely-examined feelings on a subject are.
Show threadGlyphSep 4, 2024
@vathpela @sandofsky It is pretty upsetting as a bit of a dilettante “essay” writer myself, to be so self-conscious about qualifying the scope of my own work, constantly worrying that I am overstating a case or might mislead someone and despairing of empirical claims that I want to make but can’t back up with data, and then graham just goes and posts whatever random vibrations he is picking up from his own subconscious with the authority of a prodigiously credentialed expert
Show threadLuis VillaSep 4, 2024
@sandofsky that’s insulting; airport book authors have the attention span and stamina to put out an entire book and pg not so much
Show threadLiberty and Justice For AllSep 4, 2024
@sandofsky what is founder mode
Show threadashishSep 4, 2024
@sandofsky the practice of this sounds a lot like “Owner Mode”, but you cannot call it that lest the founders realise it is the VCs who actually own everything.
Show threadMichael HughesSep 4, 2024
@sandofsky Never go full Founder Mode