2025-06-01 00:00:00
June 2025
An essay has to tell people something they don't already know. But
there are three different reasons people might not know something,
and they yield three very different kinds of essays.
One reason people won't know something is if it's not important to
know. That doesn't mean it will make a bad essay. For example, you
might write a good essay about a particular model of car. Readers
would learn something from it. It would add to their picture of the
world. For a handful of readers it might even spur some kind of
epiphany. But unless this is a very unusual car it's not critical
for everyone to know about it.
[1]
If something isn't important to know, there's no answer to the
question of why people don't know it. Not knowing random facts is
the default. But if you're going to write about things that are
important to know, you have to ask why your readers don't already
know them. Is it because they're smart but inexperienced, or because
they're obtuse?
So the three reasons readers might not already know what you tell
them are (a) that it's not important, (b) that they're obtuse,
or (c) that they're inexperienced.
The reason I did this breakdown was to get at the following fact,
which might have seemed controversial if I'd led with it, but should
be obvious now. If you're writing for smart people about important
things, you're writing for the young.
Or more precisely, that's where you'll have the most effect. Whatever
you say should also be at least somewhat novel to you, however old
you are. It's not an essay otherwise, because an essay is something
you write to figure something out. But whatever you figure out will
presumably be more of a surprise to younger readers than it is to
you.
There's a continuum of surprise. At one extreme, something you read
can change your whole way of thinking. The Selfish Gene did this
to me. It was like suddenly seeing the other interpretation of an
ambiguous image: you can treat genes rather than organisms as the
protagonists, and evolution becomes easier to understand when you
do. At the other extreme, writing merely puts into words something
readers were already thinking — or thought they were.
The impact of an essay is how much it changes readers' thinking
multiplied by the importance of the topic. But it's hard to do well
at both. It's hard to have big new ideas about important topics.
So in practice there's a tradeoff: you can change readers' thinking
a lot about moderately important things, or change it a little about
very important ones. But with younger readers the tradeoff shifts.
There's more room to change their thinking, so there's a bigger
payoff for writing about important things.
The tradeoff isn't a conscious one, at least not for me. It's more
like a kind of gravitational field that writers work in. But every
essayist works in it, whether they realize it or not.
This seems obvious once you state it, but it took me a long time
to understand. I knew I wanted to write for smart people about
important topics. I noticed empirically that I seemed to be writing
for the young. But it took me years to understand that the latter
was an automatic consequence of the former. In fact I only really
figured it out as I was writing this essay.
Now that I know it, should I change anything? I don't think so. In
fact seeing the shape of the field that writers work in has reminded
me that I'm not optimizing for returns in it. I'm not trying to
surprise readers of any particular age; I'm trying to surprise
myself.
The way I usually decide what to write about is by following
curiosity. I notice something new and dig into it. It would probably
be a mistake to change that. But seeing the shape of the essay field
has set me thinking. What would surprise young readers? Which
important things do people tend to learn late? Interesting question.
I should think about that.
Note
[1]
It's hard to write a really good essay about an unimportant
topic, though, because a really good essayist will inevitably draw
the topic into deeper waters. E. B. White could write an essay about
how to boil potatoes that ended up being full of timeless wisdom.
In which case, of course, it wouldn't really be about how to boil
potatoes; that would just have been the starting point.
Thanks to Jessica Livingston and Michael
Nielsen for reading drafts of this.
2025-05-01 00:00:00
May 2025
There are two senses in which writing can be good: it can
sound good, and the ideas can be right. It can have nice,
flowing sentences, and it can draw correct conclusions
about important things. It might seem as if these two
kinds of good would be unrelated, like the speed of a car
and the color it's painted. And yet I don't think they
are. I think writing that sounds good is more likely to
be right.
So here we have the most exciting kind of idea: one that
seems both preposterous and true. Let's examine it. How
can this possibly be true?
I know it's true from writing. You can't simultaneously
optimize two unrelated things; when you push one far
enough, you always end up sacrificing the other. And yet
no matter how hard I push, I never find myself having to
choose between the sentence that sounds best and the one
that expresses an idea best. If I did, it would be
frivolous to care how sentences sound. But in practice it
feels the opposite of frivolous. Fixing sentences that
sound bad seems to help get the ideas right.
[1]
By right I mean more than just true. Getting the ideas
right means developing them well — drawing the
conclusions that matter most, and exploring each one to
the right level of detail. So getting the ideas right is
not just a matter of saying true things, but saying the
right true things.
How could trying to make sentences sound good help you do
that? The clue to the answer is something I noticed 30
years ago when I was doing the layout for my first book.
Sometimes when you're laying out text you have bad luck.
For example, you get a section that runs one line longer
than the page. I don't know what ordinary typesetters do
in this situation, but what I did was rewrite the section
to make it a line shorter. You'd expect such an arbitrary
constraint to make the writing worse. But I found, to my
surprise, that it never did. I always ended up with
something I liked better.
I don't think this was because my writing was especially
careless. I think if you pointed to a random paragraph in
anything written by anyone and told them to make it
slightly shorter (or longer), they'd probably be able to
come up with something better.
The best analogy for this phenomenon is when you shake a
bin full of different objects. The shakes are arbitrary
motions. Or more precisely, they're not calculated to
make any two specific objects fit more closely together.
And yet repeated shaking inevitably makes the objects
discover brilliantly clever ways of packing themselves.
Gravity won't let them become less tightly packed, so any
change has to be a change for the better.
[2]
So it is with writing. If you have to rewrite an awkward
passage, you'll never do it in a way that makes it less
true. You couldn't bear it, any more than gravity could
bear things floating upward. So any change in the ideas
has to be a change for the better.
It's obvious once you think about it. Writing that sounds
good is more likely to be right for the same reason that
a well-shaken bin is more likely to be tightly packed.
But there's something else going on as well. Sounding
good isn't just a random external force that leaves the
ideas in an essay better off. It actually helps you to
get them right.
The reason is that it makes the essay easier to read.
It's less work to read writing that flows well. How does
that help the writer? Because the writer is the first
reader. When I'm working on an essay, I spend far more
time reading than writing. I'll reread some parts 50 or
100 times, replaying the thoughts in them and asking
myself, like someone sanding a piece of wood, does
anything catch? Does anything feel wrong? And the easier
the essay is to read, the easier it is to notice if
something catches.
So yes, the two senses of good writing are connected in
at least two ways. Trying to make writing sound good
makes you fix mistakes unconsciously, and also helps you
fix them consciously; it shakes the bin of ideas, and
also makes mistakes easier to see. But now that we've
dissolved one layer of preposterousness, I can't resist
adding another. Does sounding good do more than just help
you get the ideas right? Is writing that sounds good
inherently more likely to be right? Crazy as it may
seem, I think that's true too.
Obviously there's a connection at the level of individual
words. There are lots of words in English that sound like
what they mean, often in wonderfully subtle ways.
Glitter. Round. Scrape. Prim. Cavalcade. But the sound of
good writing depends even more on the way you put words
together, and there's a connection at that level too.
When writing sounds good, it's mostly because it has good
rhythm. But the rhythm of good writing is not the rhythm
of music, or the meter of verse. It's not so regular. If
it were, it wouldn't be good, because the rhythm of good
writing has to match the ideas in it, and ideas have all
kinds of different shapes. Sometimes they're simple and
you just state them. But other times they're more subtle,
and you need longer, more complicated sentences to tease
out all the implications.
An essay is a cleaned up train of thought, in the same
way dialogue is cleaned up conversation, and a train of
thought has a natural rhythm. So when an essay sounds
good, it's not merely because it has a pleasing rhythm,
but because it has its natural one. Which means you can
use getting the rhythm right as a heuristic for getting
the ideas right. And not just in principle: good writers
do both simultaneously as a matter of course. Often I
don't even distinguish between the two problems. I just
think Ugh, this doesn't sound right; what do I mean to
say here?
[3]
The sound of writing turns out to be more like the shape
of a plane than the color of a car. If it looks good, as
Kelly Johnson used to say, it will fly well.
This is only true of writing that's used to develop
ideas, though. It doesn't apply when you have ideas in
some other way and then write about them afterward — for
example, if you build something, or conduct an
experiment, and then write a paper about it. In such
cases the ideas often live more in the work than the
writing, so the writing can be bad even though the ideas
are good. The writing in textbooks and popular surveys
can be bad for the same reason: the author isn't
developing the ideas, merely describing other people's.
It's only when you're writing to develop ideas that
there's such a close connection between the two senses of
doing it well.
Ok, many people will be thinking, this seems plausible so
far, but what about liars? Is it not notoriously possible
for a smooth-tongued liar to write something beautiful
that's completely false?
It is, of course. But not without method acting. The way
to write something beautiful and false is to begin by
making yourself almost believe it. So just like someone
writing something beautiful and true, you're presenting a
perfectly-formed train of thought. The difference is the
point where it attaches to the world. You're saying
something that would be true if certain false premises
were. If for some bizarre reason the number of jobs in a
country were fixed, then immigrants really would be
taking our jobs.
So it's not quite right to say that better sounding
writing is more likely to be true. Better sounding
writing is more likely to be internally consistent. If
the writer is honest, internal consistency and truth
converge.
But while we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing
is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse:
something that seems clumsily written will usually have
gotten the ideas wrong too.
Indeed, the two senses of good writing are more like two
ends of the same thing. The connection between them is
not a rigid one; the goodness of good writing is not a
rod but a rope, with multiple overlapping connections
running through it. But it's hard to move one end without
moving the other. It's hard to be right without sounding
right.
Notes
[1]
The closest thing to an exception is when you have
to go back and insert a new point into the middle of
something you've written. This often messes up the flow,
sometimes in ways you can never quite repair. But I think
the ultimate source of this problem is that ideas are
tree-shaped and essays are linear. You inevitably run
into difficulties when you try to cram the former into
the latter. Frankly it's surprising how much you can get
away with. But even so you sometimes have to resort to an
endnote.
[2]
Obviously if you shake the bin hard enough the
objects in it can become less tightly packed. And
similarly, if you imposed some huge external constraint
on your writing, like using alternating one and two
syllable words, the ideas would start to suffer.
[3]
Bizarrely enough, this happened in the writing of
this very paragraph. An earlier version shared several
phrases in common with the preceding paragraph, and the
repetition bugged me each time I reread it. When I got
annoyed enough to fix it, I discovered that the
repetition reflected a problem in the underlying ideas,
and I fixed both simultaneously.
Thanks to Jessica Livingston
and Courtenay Pipkin for reading drafts of this.
2025-03-01 00:00:00
March 2025
What should one do? That may seem a strange question, but it's not
meaningless or unanswerable. It's the sort of question kids ask
before they learn not to ask big questions. I only came across it
myself in the process of investigating something else. But once I
did, I thought I should at least try to answer it.
So what should one do? One should help people, and take care of
the world. Those two are obvious. But is there anything else? When
I ask that, the answer that pops up is Make good new things.
I can't prove that one should do this, any more than I can prove
that one should help people or take care of the world. We're talking
about first principles here. But I can explain why this principle
makes sense. The most impressive thing humans can do is to think.
It may be the most impressive thing that can be done. And the best
kind of thinking, or more precisely the best proof that one has
thought well, is to make good new things.
I mean new things in a very general sense. Newton's physics was a
good new thing. Indeed, the first version of this principle was to
have good new ideas. But that didn't seem general enough: it didn't
include making art or music, for example, except insofar as they
embody new ideas. And while they may embody new ideas, that's not
all they embody, unless you stretch the word "idea" so uselessly
thin that it includes everything that goes through your nervous
system.
Even for ideas that one has consciously, though, I prefer the
phrasing "make good new things." There are other ways to describe
the best kind of thinking. To make discoveries, for example, or to
understand something more deeply than others have. But how well do
you understand something if you can't make a model of it, or write
about it? Indeed, trying to express what you understand is not just
a way to prove that you understand it, but a way to understand it
better.
Another reason I like this phrasing is that it biases us toward
creation. It causes us to prefer the kind of ideas that are naturally
seen as making things rather than, say, making critical observations
about things other people have made. Those are ideas too, and
sometimes valuable ones, but it's easy to trick oneself into believing
they're more valuable than they are. Criticism seems sophisticated,
and making new things often seems awkward, especially at first; and
yet it's precisely those first steps that are most rare and valuable.
Is newness essential? I think so. Obviously it's essential in
science. If you copied a paper of someone else's and published it
as your own, it would seem not merely unimpressive but dishonest.
And it's similar in the arts. A copy of a good painting can be a
pleasing thing, but it's not impressive in the way the original
was. Which in turn implies it's not impressive to make the same
thing over and over, however well; you're just copying yourself.
Note though that we're talking about a different kind of should
with this principle. Taking care of people and the world are shoulds
in the sense that they're one's duty, but making good new things
is a should in the sense that this is how to live to one's full
potential. Historically most rules about how to live have been a
mix of both kinds of should, though usually with more of the former
than the latter.
[1]
For most of history the question "What should one do?" got much the
same answer everywhere, whether you asked Cicero or Confucius. You
should be wise, brave, honest, temperate, and just, uphold tradition,
and serve the public interest. There was a long stretch where in
some parts of the world the answer became "Serve God," but in
practice it was still considered good to be wise, brave, honest,
temperate, and just, uphold tradition, and serve the public interest.
And indeed this recipe would have seemed right to most Victorians.
But there's nothing in it about taking care of the world or making
new things, and that's a bit worrying, because it seems like this
question should be a timeless one. The answer shouldn't change much.
I'm not too worried that the traditional answers don't mention
taking care of the world. Obviously people only started to care
about that once it became clear we could ruin it. But how can making
good new things be important if the traditional answers don't mention
it?
The traditional answers were answers to a slightly different question.
They were answers to the question of how to be, rather than what
to do. The audience didn't have a lot of choice about what to do.
The audience up till recent centuries was the landowning class,
which was also the political class. They weren't choosing between
doing physics and writing novels. Their work was foreordained:
manage their estates, participate in politics, fight when necessary.
It was ok to do certain other kinds of work in one's spare time,
but ideally one didn't have any. Cicero's De Officiis is one of the
great classical answers to the question of how to live, and in it
he explicitly says that he wouldn't even be writing it if he hadn't
been excluded from public life by recent political upheavals.
[2]
There were of course people doing what we would now call "original
work," and they were often admired for it, but they weren't seen
as models. Archimedes knew that he was the first to prove that a
sphere has 2/3 the volume of the smallest enclosing cylinder and
was very pleased about it. But you don't find ancient writers urging
their readers to emulate him. They regarded him more as a prodigy
than a model.
Now many more of us can follow Archimedes's example and devote most
of our attention to one kind of work. He turned out to be a model
after all, along with a collection of other people that his
contemporaries would have found it strange to treat as a distinct
group, because the vein of people making new things ran at right
angles to the social hierarchy.
What kinds of new things count? I'd rather leave that question to
the makers of them. It would be a risky business to try to define
any kind of threshold, because new kinds of work are often despised
at first. Raymond Chandler was writing literal pulp fiction, and
he's now recognized as one of the best writers of the twentieth
century. Indeed this pattern is so common that you can use it as a
recipe: if you're excited about some kind of work that's not
considered prestigious and you can explain what everyone else is
overlooking about it, then this is not merely a kind of work that's
ok to do, but one to seek out.
The other reason I wouldn't want to define any thresholds is that
we don't need them. The kind of people who make good new things
don't need rules to keep them honest.
So there's my guess at a set of principles to live by: take care
of people and the world, and make good new things. Different people
will do these to varying degrees. There will presumably be lots who
focus entirely on taking care of people. There will be a few who
focus mostly on making new things. But even if you're one of those,
you should at least make sure that the new things you make don't
net harm people or the world. And if you go a step further and
try to make things that help them, you may find you're ahead on the
trade. You'll be more constrained in what you can make, but you'll
make it with more energy.
On the other hand, if you make something amazing, you'll often be
helping people or the world even if you didn't mean to. Newton was
driven by curiosity and ambition, not by any practical effect his
work might have, and yet the practical effect of his work has been
enormous. And this seems the rule rather than the exception. So
if you think you can make something amazing, you should probably
just go ahead and do it.
Notes
[1]
We could treat all three as the same kind of should by saying
that it's one's duty to live well — for example by saying, as some
Christians have, that it's one's duty to make the most of one's
God-given gifts. But this seems one of those casuistries people
invented to evade the stern requirements of religion: it was permissible to
spend time studying math instead of praying or performing acts of
charity because otherwise you were rejecting a gift God had given
you. A useful casuistry no doubt, but we don't need it.
We could also combine the first two principles, since people are
part of the world. Why should our species get special treatment?
I won't try to justify this choice, but I'm skeptical that anyone
who claims to think differently actually lives according to their
principles.
[2]
Confucius was also excluded from public life after ending up
on the losing end of a power struggle, and presumably he too would
not be so famous now if it hadn't been for this long stretch of
enforced leisure.
Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica
Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.
2025-01-01 00:00:00
January 2025
The word "prig" isn't very common now, but if you look up
the definition, it will sound familiar. Google's isn't bad:
A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.This sense of the word originated in the 18th century, and its age is an important clue: it shows that although wokeness is a comparatively recent phenomenon, it's an instance of a much older one.
An aggressively performative focus on social justice.In other words, it's people being prigs about social justice. And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice. [0]
The middle-class student protestors of the New Left rejected the socialist/Marxist left as unhip. They were interested in sexier forms of oppression uncovered by cultural analysis (Marcuse) and abstruse "Theory". Labor politics became stodgy and old-fashioned. This took a couple generations to work through. The woke ideology's conspicuous lack of interest in the working class is the tell-tale sign. Such fragments as are, er, left of the old left are anti-woke, and meanwhile the actual working class shifted to the populist right and gave us Trump. Trump and wokeness are cousins.[2] It helped that the humanities and social sciences also included some of the biggest and easiest undergrad majors. If a political movement had to start with physics students, it could never get off the ground; there would be too few of them, and they wouldn't have the time to spare.
The middle-class origins of wokeness smoothed its way through the institutions because it had no interest in "seizing the means of production" (how quaint such phrases seem now), which would quickly have run up against hard state and corporate power. The fact that wokeness only expressed interest in other kinds of class (race, sex, etc) signalled compromise with existing power: give us power within your system and we'll bestow the resource we control — moral rectitude — upon you. As an ideological stalking horse for gaining control over discourse and institutions, this succeeded where a more ambitious revolutionary program would not have.
2024-10-01 00:00:00
October 2024
I'm usually reluctant to make predictions about technology, but I
feel fairly confident about this one: in a couple decades there
won't be many people who can write.
One of the strangest things you learn if you're a writer is how
many people have trouble writing. Doctors know how many people have
a mole they're worried about; people who are good at setting up
computers know how many people aren't; writers know how many people
need help writing.
The reason so many people have trouble writing is that it's
fundamentally difficult. To write well you have to think clearly,
and thinking clearly is hard.
And yet writing pervades many jobs, and the more prestigious the
job, the more writing it tends to require.
These two powerful opposing forces, the pervasive expectation of
writing and the irreducible difficulty of doing it, create enormous
pressure. This is why eminent professors often turn out to have
resorted to plagiarism. The most striking thing to me about these
cases is the pettiness of the thefts. The stuff they steal is usually
the most mundane boilerplate — the sort of thing that anyone who
was even halfway decent at writing could turn out with no effort
at all. Which means they're not even halfway decent at writing.
Till recently there was no convenient escape valve for the pressure
created by these opposing forces. You could pay someone to write
for you, like JFK, or plagiarize, like MLK, but if you couldn't buy
or steal words, you had to write them yourself. And as a result
nearly everyone who was expected to write had to learn how.
Not anymore. AI has blown this world open. Almost all pressure to
write has dissipated. You can have AI do it for you, both in school
and at work.
The result will be a world divided into writes and write-nots.
There will still be some people who can write. Some of us like it.
But the middle ground between those who are good at writing and
those who can't write at all will disappear. Instead of good writers,
ok writers, and people who can't write, there will just be good
writers and people who can't write.
Is that so bad? Isn't it common for skills to disappear when
technology makes them obsolete? There aren't many blacksmiths left,
and it doesn't seem to be a problem.
Yes, it's bad. The reason is something I mentioned earlier: writing
is thinking. In fact there's a kind of thinking that can only be
done by writing. You can't make this point better than Leslie Lamport
did:
If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking.So a world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots. I know which half I want to be in, and I bet you do too.
2024-09-01 00:00:00
September 2024
At a YC event last week Brian Chesky gave a talk that everyone who
was there will remember. Most founders I talked to afterward said
it was the best they'd ever heard. Ron Conway, for the first time
in his life, forgot to take notes. I'm not going to try to reproduce
it here. Instead I want to talk about a question it raised.
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.
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. 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.
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.
In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder
mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley
have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to
manager mode. 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.
There are as far as I know no books specifically about founder mode.
Business schools don't know it exists. All we have so far are the
experiments of individual founders who've been figuring it out for
themselves. But now that we know what we're looking for, we can
search for it. I hope in a few years founder mode will be as well
understood as manager mode. We can already guess at some of the
ways it will differ.
The way managers are taught to run companies seems to be like modular
design in the sense that you treat subtrees of the org chart as
black boxes. You tell your direct reports what to do, and it's up
to them to figure out how. But you don't get involved in the details
of what they do. That would be micromanaging them, which is bad.
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.
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.
[1]
Whatever founder mode consists of, it's pretty clear that it's going
to break the principle that the CEO should engage with the company
only via his or her direct reports. "Skip-level" meetings will
become the norm instead of a practice so unusual that there's a
name for it. And once you abandon that constraint there are a huge
number of permutations to choose from.
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.
[2]
Obviously founders can't keep running a 2000 person company the way
they ran it when it had 20. There's going to have to be some amount
of delegation. Where the borders of autonomy end up, and how sharp
they are, will probably vary from company to company. They'll even
vary from time to time within the same company, as managers earn
trust. So founder mode will be more complicated than manager mode.
But it will also work better. We already know that from the examples
of individual founders groping their way toward it.
Indeed, another prediction I'll make about founder mode is that
once we figure out what it is, we'll find that a number of individual
founders were already most of the way there — except that in doing
what they did they were regarded by many as eccentric or worse.
[3]
Curiously enough it's an encouraging thought that we still know so
little about founder mode. Look at what founders have achieved
already, and yet they've achieved this against a headwind of bad
advice. Imagine what they'll do once we can tell them how to run
their companies like Steve Jobs instead of John Sculley.
Notes
[1]
The more diplomatic way of phrasing this statement would be
to say that experienced C-level execs are often very skilled at
managing up. And I don't think anyone with knowledge of this world
would dispute that.
[2]
If the practice of having such retreats became so widespread
that even mature companies dominated by politics started to do it,
we could quantify the senescence of companies by the average depth
on the org chart of those invited.
[3]
I also have another less optimistic prediction: as soon as
the concept of founder mode becomes established, people will start
misusing it. Founders who are unable to delegate even things they
should will use founder mode as the excuse. Or managers who aren't
founders will decide they should try to act like founders. That may
even work, to some extent, but the results will be messy when it
doesn't; the modular approach does at least limit the damage a bad
CEO can do.
Thanks to Brian Chesky, Patrick Collison,
Ron Conway, Jessica
Livingston, Elon Musk, Ryan Petersen, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan
for reading drafts of this.