Founder Mode / Paul Graham
创始人模式 / 保罗·格雷厄姆
September 2024
2024年9月
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.
在上周的一次YC活动中，布莱恩·切斯基发表了一场与会者们将永生难忘的演讲。之后我与大多数创始人交谈时，他们都表示这是他们听过的最好的演讲。罗恩·康威有生以来第一次忘记记笔记。我不会试图在这里重现它。相反，我想谈谈它引发的一个问题。
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.
布莱恩演讲的主题是，关于如何运营大公司的传统观念是错误的。随着Airbnb的发展，善意的人们建议他必须以某种方式来管理公司，以实现规模化。他们的建议可以乐观地总结为“雇佣优秀的人才，并给予他们发挥工作的空间。”他遵循了这一建议，结果却是灾难性的。因此，他不得不自己找出更好的方法，部分通过研究史蒂夫·乔布斯如何管理苹果公司来实现。到目前为止，这似乎奏效了。Airbnb的自由现金流利润率现在位居硅谷前列。
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.
此次活动的听众包括我们所资助的许多最成功的创始人，一位接一位地表示同样的事情也发生在他们身上。他们在公司成长过程中被给予了相同的管理建议，但这些建议并没有帮助他们的公司，反而对公司造成了损害。
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.
为什么每个人都在告诉这些创始人错误的事情？这是我心中的一个大谜团。经过一番思考后，我找到了答案：他们所被告知的是如何管理一家你并未创立的公司——如何仅作为一个职业经理人来管理公司。但这种方法的效果远不如创始人，因此对创始人来说，这种方法感觉像是破碎的。创始人可以做一些经理人无法做到的事情，而不去做这些事情对创始人来说感觉不对，因为确实如此。
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.
实际上，管理公司的方式有两种不同的方法：创始人模式和经理人模式。直到现在，即便在硅谷，大多数人也隐含地认为，扩展初创公司意味着转向经理人模式。但我们可以从那些尝试过这一模式并感到失望的创始人，以及他们成功摆脱这一模式的尝试中推断出另一种模式的存在。
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.
据我所知，目前没有专门关于创始人模式的书籍。商学院也不知道它的存在。到目前为止，我们只有那些独立创始人在摸索过程中所做的实验。但现在我们知道了我们在寻找什么，我们可以开始寻找它。我希望在几年内，创始人模式能够像经理人模式一样被充分理解。我们已经可以猜测出一些它将有别于经理人模式的方式。
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.
经理人被教授如何管理公司的方式似乎像是模块化设计，意味着你将组织结构图的子树视为黑盒。你告诉你的直接下属该做什么，由他们来决定如何做。但你不参与他们具体做什么的细节。这会被认为是对他们的微观管理，这是不好的。
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.
雇佣优秀的人才并给予他们发挥工作的空间。听起来描述起来很棒，不是吗？但实际上，从一位又一位创始人的报告来看，这往往意味着：雇佣职业骗子，让他们把公司开倒闭。
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.
我在布莱恩的演讲中以及之后与创始人交谈时注意到的一个主题是被“煤气灯效应”影响的感觉。创始人觉得自己被双重施压——一方面是被告知必须像经理人一样管理公司，另一方面是当他们这样做时，被为他们工作的人施压。通常，当你周围的每个人都不同意你时，你的默认假设应该是你自己错了。但这是一个罕见的例外。那些没有自己成为过创始人的风险投资者不知道创始人应该如何管理公司，而高层管理人员，作为一个群体，包括一些世界上最善于撒谎的人。
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.
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互动的原则。“跨级”会议将成为常态，而不是一种如此不寻常的做法以至于有一个专门的名称。一旦你放弃了这种限制，就有大量的排列组合可供选择。
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.
例如，史蒂夫·乔布斯曾为他认为的苹果公司最重要的100人举办年度静修会，这些人并不是组织结构图上层级最高的100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？然而，想象一下这样的做法有多么有用。它可以让一家大公司感觉像一家初创公司。乔布斯大概不会在这些静修会无效的情况下继续举办。但我从未听说过其他公司这样做。那么这是一个好主意，还是一个坏主意？我们仍然不知道。这就是我们对创始人模式了解的如此之少。
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.
显然，创始人无法继续以他们在拥有20人时的方式管理一个拥有2000人的公司。必须进行一定程度的委托。自治的边界将在哪里结束，以及这些边界有多明显，可能因公司而异。即使在同一家公司内，随着经理人赢得信任，这些边界也会随着时间的推移而变化。因此，创始人模式将比经理人模式更为复杂。但它也会更有效。我们已经从个别创始人摸索前行的例子中了解到这一点。
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.
事实上，我对创始人模式的另一个预测是，一旦我们弄清了它，我们会发现许多个别创始人已经完成了大部分工作——只是他们在做这些事情时，许多人认为他们是怪异的，甚至更糟。
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.
奇怪的是，我们对创始人模式了解如此之少，这本身就是一个令人鼓舞的想法。看看创始人们已经取得的成就，他们是在错误的建议的逆流中取得的成就。想象一下，一旦我们可以告诉他们如何像史蒂夫·乔布斯而不是约翰·斯卡利那样管理他们的公司，他们将会做出什么样的成就。
Notes
注释
[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.
[1] 更委婉的说法是，经验丰富的高层管理人员往往非常擅长向上管理。我认为了解这个领域的人都会认同这一点。
[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.
[2] 如果举办这样的静修会的做法变得如此普遍，甚至连那些被政治主导的成熟公司也开始这样做，我们可以通过被邀请者在组织结构图中的平均深度来量化公司的老化程度。
[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.
[3] 我还有另一个不那么乐观的预测：一旦“创始人模式”这个概念被确立，人们将开始滥用它。无法委托他们应该委托的事情的创始人将以创始人模式为借口。或是那些不是创始人的经理人会决定他们应该尝试像创始人一样行事。这在某种程度上可能会奏效，但当它不起作用时，结果将会混乱；模块化的方法至少可以限制一个糟糕的CEO可能造成的损害。
Thanks to Brian Chesky, Patrick Collison, Ron Conway, Jessica Livingston, Elon Musk, Ryan Petersen, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this.
感谢布莱恩·切斯基、帕特里克·科利森、罗恩·康威、杰西卡·利文斯顿、埃隆·马斯克、瑞安·彼得森、哈吉·塔加尔和加里·谭对本文草稿的阅读。
