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来源：https://www.paulgraham.com/foundermode.html
作者：Paul Graham
经济下行期，每家企业更需要“创始人模式”（Founder Mode）
背景&导读：
据说，这是硅谷当下被创业者讨论最多的话题。9月初读到原文时，我并不感到惊讶。原因有两个：
一是作者（保罗·格雷厄姆，程序员、风险投资家、博客作者和技术作家）的身份本就是创业者（是全球最早的Web应用Viaweb的创始人之一），又是风险投资家，而其所记录的Airbnb的Brian Chesky的演讲，也是从创始人视角去谈的。因此，无论是创业者视角，还是风投视角，都极其看重“创始人（Founder）的作用，这一点毫无疑问，创始人之于一家公司的重要性，再怎么强调都不为过；
二是作者提到的”经理人模式（Manager Mode）”，其实是自工业革命200余年来，包括世界500强在内的大企业（也包括很多中小企业）普遍采用的成熟模式，更确切的称呼是“职业经理人模式”（Profession Manager Mode）。事实上，只要企业想做强做大，必然会雇佣经理人，因此，作者提到的“经理人模式”的是是非非，并非是全盘否定普遍存在的“职业经理人”机制，而是强调“作为创始人，不要做甩手掌柜，不要寄希望用经理人来替代自己在关键时刻为公司所做的决策与使命，那本质上是一种推卸责任”。这一点，大家在阅读内容时可以作为文字之外的背景参考。
我为何推荐这篇文章？是因为在国内很多行业都面临下行期，很多企业（特别是科创类的“独角兽”与专精特新等“小巨人”企业）都面临攸关生死的关键抉择之时，企业需要回到“创始人模式”（Founder Mode）重新定位和思考，用于改变和调整过去某个时期顺风顺水的做法，敢于自我革命，带领团队走出低谷，“熬”过这段难耐的时期，找到适合自己的新模式、新打法。而对于很多职场打工人而言，期待这篇文章能让大家理解“即便是打工，也要为自己全力以赴”这一属于打工人的“创始人模式”。冬天到了，多给自己一件过冬的棉衣。
以下为中英文全文，原文链接：https://www.paulgraham.com/foundermode.html
中文版全文：
上周在YC的一次活动中，Brian Chesky发表了一场所有在场的人都将铭记于心的演讲。会后，我与许多创始人交流，他们几乎都认为这是他们听过的最好的演讲。Ron Conway人生中第一次忘了做笔记。我不会在这里尝试复述这场演讲，而是想讨论它引发的一个问题。
Brian演讲的主题是，关于如何管理大型公司的传统智慧是错误的。随着Airbnb的发展，很多善意的人建议他必须以某种方式管理公司，以便实现规模化。
他们的建议可以乐观地概括为“雇佣优秀的人并让他们放手去做”。Brian遵循了这些建议，结果却非常糟糕。因此，他不得不自己探索更好的方法，其中一部分是通过研究Steve Jobs如何管理苹果公司来实现的。到目前为止，这种方法似乎是有效的。
Airbnb的自由现金流利润率现在是硅谷最好的之一。参加这次活动的观众中有很多我们资助过的最成功的创始人，他们一个接一个地说，他们也遇到了同样的情况。
他们在公司成长过程中得到了相同的管理建议，但这些建议不仅没有帮助公司，反而给公司带来了损害。
为什么每个人都在告诉这些创始人错误的东西？这对我来说是一个大谜团。
在思考了一段时间后，我找到了答案：他们被告知的其实是如何管理一个他们没有创立的公司——也就是，如果你只是一个职业经理人，该如何管理公司。
但这种方法的效果如此之差，以至于对创始人来说感觉就是错的。
创始人能够做到的事情，职业经理人做不到，不去做这些事情对于创始人来说感觉不对，因为这确实不对。
实际上，管理公司有两种截然不同的方式：创始人模式和经理人模式。
迄今为止，即使在硅谷，大多数人也默认认为，创业公司要实现规模化就必须转变为经理人模式。但是我们可以从创始人的失望，以及他们成功逃离这种方法的经历中推测出另一种模式的存在。
据我所知，目前还没有专门关于创始人模式的书籍。商学院也不知道这种模式的存在。
目前我们所拥有的只是个别创始人的实验，他们在摸索中找到了自己的方式。但现在我们知道了要寻找什么，我们可以开始探究。
我希望在几年内，创始人模式会像经理人模式一样为人所熟知。我们已经可以猜测出它的一些不同之处。
经理人被教导的管理公司方式似乎像是模块化设计，因为你把组织结构图中的子树当作黑箱来处理。
你告诉直接下属要做什么，而具体怎么做则由他们自己决定。你不参与他们工作的细节。这样做就是在微观管理他们，而这是不好的。
“雇佣优秀的人并让他们放手去做。”听起来很棒，不是吗？
但根据创始人们的一致反馈，这种方法在实践中通常意味着：雇佣职业伪装者，然后让他们把公司带向毁灭。
在Brian的演讲和与其他创始人的交流中，我注意到的一个主题是被“煤气灯效应”影响的感觉。创始人觉得自己在两方面都受到了“煤气灯效应”的影响——
一方面是那些告诉他们必须像经理人一样管理公司的人，另一方面是当他们这么做时为他们工作的人。
通常，当周围的每个人都与你意见不同时，你的默认假设应该是自己错了。
但这是一个罕见的例外。没有创办过公司的风险投资人不知道创始人应该如何管理公司，而高管们作为一个群体，包含了世界上最擅长撒谎的人之一。[1]
无论创始人模式包含什么，很明显它将打破“CEO只能通过直接下属与公司接触”这一原则。
“跨层级”会议将成为常态，而不再是一种罕见到需要命名的实践。一旦你放弃了这种限制，就有大量的可能性可以选择。
例如，Steve Jobs每年都会为他认为苹果公司最重要的100人组织一次年度度假，而这100人并不都是公司组织结构图上层级最高的人。
你能想象在一家普通公司要做到这一点需要多大的意志力吗？但想象一下，这样的活动可能有多大的用处。
它可以让大公司有如初创公司般的活力。如果这些度假没有效果，Steve大概也不会一直坚持办下去。但我从未听说过其他公司也在做这种事情。
那么这是一个好主意还是坏主意？我们仍然不知道。这就是我们对创始人模式知之甚少的程度。[2]
显然，创始人不可能继续用管理20人时的方式来管理一个2000人的公司，某种程度的授权是不可避免的。
自主权的边界将会因公司而异，甚至在同一家公司内，随着经理人逐渐获得信任，这些边界也会随时间变化。
因此，创始人模式将比经理人模式更复杂。但它也会更有效。这一点我们已经从那些摸索出路的个别创始人的例子中得到了证明。
事实上，我对创始人模式的另一个预测是，一旦我们搞清楚它是什么，我们会发现许多个别创始人早就已经大部分走在这条路上——尽管他们在做这些事情时，很多人认为他们是古怪的甚至更糟。[3]
令人鼓舞的是，我们对创始人模式知之甚少。看看创始人们已经取得的成就，他们是在逆风中取得这些成就的。
想象一下，当我们能够告诉他们如何像Steve Jobs而不是John Sculley那样管理公司时，他们将会取得怎样的成就。
附注
[1] 更委婉的说法是，经验丰富的高管通常非常擅长向上管理。我认为熟悉这个领域的人不会对此有异议。
[2] 如果这种度假方式变得如此普遍，以至于连那些被政治主导的成熟公司也开始效仿，我们可以通过被邀请者在组织结构图中的平均层级深度来量化公司衰老的程度。
[3] 我还有另一个不太乐观的预测：一旦创始人模式的概念确立，人们就会开始滥用它。那些无法有效授权的创始人会用创始人模式作为借口。而不是创始人的经理人也会决定他们应该像创始人一样行事。这在某种程度上可能会奏效，但当它不起作用时，结果将会很混乱；模块化的方法至少能限制糟糕的CEO所能造成的损害。
英文版全文：
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.
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