I could – and probably should – write an entire essay about the cult of the founder in Silicon Valley, how it developed and the damage it has done. This article from Dave Karpf, though, encapsulates some of my own thinking. Contrasting Aaron Swartz and Sam Altman – both members of the first Ycombinator cohort – is such an interesting approach.
But the other reason why the whole founder mode thing is a hot mess is that Paul Graham is entirely wrong about management and leadership. Yeah, I know: Graham has been involved with building more companies than I have. But he’s never actually run, or even been in a senior leadership role, in a large company.
There’s a key paragraph in his essay which I think shows this:
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.If you are hiring "professional fakers" that means you are a poor manager. One of the most important thing that leaders focus on is hiring the right people, and that takes experience, or training, or both. Founders tend to lack all of these things, so of course they don't always hire great people. And even good leaders don't have a 100% hit rate (John Browett anybody?). As Allison Morrow puts it, founder mode is just another way of telling toxic bosses they are really great. And lord knows, that is not what Silicon Valley needs right now.
Another tell on Graham’s lack of experience in this area: his lack of knowledge that companies other than Steve Jobs' Apple run annual retreats for the 100 most influential people, regardless of level. As Karpf notes, many companies do this. Heck, I have been part of retreats like that even at old-school publishing companies.
But if you have never worked in large companies, and you have the kind of founder myopia that Graham has, you wouldn’t know that.
I think Dave gets it right when he connects founder mode with other Silicon Valley craziness:
This is all of a piece with Andreessen’s techno-optimist manifesto and Balaji Srinivasan’s bat shit bitcoin declarations. A small, cloistered elite of not-especially-bright billionaires have decided that they are very, exceptional, and that the problem with society these days is that people keep treating them like everyone else.I think all this also relates to a post on Threads by Neil Cybart:
One thing I have noticed is that some people in tech (writers, journalists, etc.) are becoming tired. Seems like it started around the pandemic. They have lost interest. However, they think the issue is Big Tech becoming boring instead of themselves. A good sign that it may be time for a re-shifting of voices in tech. I think we are going to see that play out in the coming years.I have been thinking about Neil's post a lot since I read it (always the sign of a good post!), in part because I too have felt bored by tech. Given that I have been fascinated by tech for almost the whole of my life, that has felt like a pretty odd place to be, mentally.
But I don’t think it’s that people themselves are getting boring: it’s that the landscape and characters in tech coverage have become more one dimensional. The hype cycle driven by characters like Graham often feels like you are being bludgeoned around the head if you’re not “all in” on crypto, or the metaverse, or LLMs, or whatever.
And the personalities – and tech is, and always has been, as much about people as things – are cartoon villains/heroic founders (delete as appropriate) who live in a bubble of their own. Musk, Graham, Altman… you name it.
Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz. As Dave Karpf rightly identifies, the hacker has vanished from the scene, to be replaced by an endless array of know-nothing hero founders whose main superpower is the ability to bully subordinates (and half of Twitter) into believing they are always right.
Where the hackers exist, they are either buried in the depths of big companies (does Johny Srouji ever leave that pristine basement?) or working on interesting but niche open source projects, often involving writing yet another text editor.
In allowing and encouraging the likes of Graham to define what tech looks like, we have made tech look boring, unless you are the kind of teenage who dreams of getting rich quick by starting a company, riding a hype cycle, and flipping it to some sucker for a few hundred million.
I doubt that commentators who love technology are bored with tech. But I do think we are bored with blow hards like Graham being the centre of attention, of hype cycles, and of huge corporations that are more interested in boosting revenues through digging moats and buying off potential competition.
Perhaps what Neil is detecting isn’t boredom, but dismay. If you lived through the excitement of the 80s and 90s, and the web optimism of the 00s, it’s difficult to look at people like Graham – people who aren’t as bright as they think they are – and get excited about the future of the industry.
