How I failed

Reflections on a recent Paul Graham piece – and on the culture at Oxide.

With some time passed, Bryan and Adam offer a non-hot take on Paul Graham's

Paul Graham’s Founder Mode is an important piece, and you should read it if for no other reason that “founder mode” will surely enter the lexicon (and as Graham grimly predicts: “as soon as the concept of founder mode becomes established, people will start misusing it”). When building a company, founders are engaged in several different acts at once: raising capital; building a product; connecting that product to a market; building an organization to do all of these. Founders make lots of mistakes in all of these activities, and Graham’s essay highlights a particular kind of mistake in which founders are overly deferential to expertise or convention. Pejoratively referring to this as “Management Mode”, Graham frames this in the Silicon Valley dramaturgical dyad of Steve Jobs and John Scully. While that’s a little too reductive (anyone seeking to understand Jobs needs to read Randall Stross’s superlative Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing, highlighting Jobs’s many post-Scully failures at NeXT), Graham has identified a real issue here, albeit without much specificity.