Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

When the post came out, for the first time in a long time I found myself nodding my head with Graham, because I feel like basically everyone who has worked in a company that has found some form of product/market fit and started staffing and and delegating has had the experience of watching pasteurized process cheese food faceplant trying to understand and further a sane goal a founding team got some traction with when it was smaller. Everyone has. There was something to it. But now, as usual, everyone has overindexed on everything, so we're sitting here comparing Aaron Swartz to Sam Altman as if either of them would be successful parachuted into the median immediate-post-PMF company.

As is so often the case, these stories are just vectors along which we recapitulate our existing beliefs. Woz vs. Jobs! We'll be talking about this 50 years from now, as if there was anything to learn from it.

Of course, this means the original post, the "founder mode" post, was bad. The first cut of most things is bad! I've talked to 2 people now who saw the AirBNB talk that prompted it, and both said the talk was way better than the "founder mode" post, which left both scratching their heads. Maybe someone (maybe Graham) will find a better way to distill the talk? Neither of my friends will go into more detail about that talk, so I hope someone does.

In the meantime: this all feels like drama for its own sake. Certainly, if we're talking about business and invoking aaronsw, it seems safe to guess there isn't much trenchant in this particular story. "Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz". For fuck's sake.

I think another way to explain "being bored" (and a bunch of other features that this post describes). These people are getting old: Andreessen is 53, Graham is 59, the author is in his fifties; I am too. Nothing too surprising about having older people be the supposed "blowhard" voices of an industry -- except during the golden age that these posts harken back too, all of these pundits were twenty or so years younger.

I'm prompted to think about this after watching the last Apple event livestream, and thinking to myself "these people all seem so /old/". Steve Jobs seemed ancient to me when he returned to Apple in 1997: he was 42.

This is not to say that techs, hackers, etc, have grown old -- but the distribution of ages has definitely widened, and its center may have shifted a little right too. That leaves plenty of room for much younger people to look at much older people and wonder at their strange, blowhard opinions. It also leads to older types feeling tired and bored with tech : and projecting that as the dominant tone to those of any age.

> it’s difficult to look at people like Graham — people who aren’t as bright as they think they are

Graham’s (alleged) arrogance about his brightness isn’t really the issue here. Let’s face it, he is bright. That’s not what is causing this boredom/dismay, though.

The issue is that somehow the rest of us became entranced by the “cult of Graham” and his thinking about startups/founders, and collectively we made his way into the way, ostracizing those that lived their life outside the idealized startup paradigm that Graham crafted. Creation of this dismay isn’t on him alone, it’s on all of us.

The part of "tech" which is ad-driven has become both boring and seriously annoying. Unfortunately, that's where the money is.

There are interesting things going on:

* Self-driving cars finally work. San Francisco is full of them. Next step is to get the cost down and replace those rotating scanners with something cheaper. At least the ones that aren't on top.

* Robotic manipulation in unstructured situations is just, maybe, starting to work. Maybe. We're getting close to Amazon warehouses, at least, going fully automatic. We might get more general purpose automated factories. This has been expected since the 1950s, but this time it might happen. Neural nets are better and cheaper now.

* Electric cars. For new car sales, 10% in US are electric. 20% worldwide. 50% in China. US is way behind.

* Flying cars. The scaled-up drone flying cars actually work. First commercial deployment in China. Range is limited, but good enough to get VIPs around congested cities.

* Batteries. Solid-state batteries still are not available in quantity, because the manufacturing process is hard. At least five major companies are working on it. Somebody will crack that. They will not be in the US.

* Metals. Lots of sources found for rare earths. Electric powered basic steel has been demonstrated.

* Medical. AIDS drugs are in good shape. Diabetes may be next. There's been real progress on some kinds of cancer. Even obesity can be cured.

I'm having a hard time putting this into words. Apologies if this isn't terribly clear.

As easy as it is to dismiss tech hype - nothing wrong with doing that honestly - autonomous city driving is inching closer to the ubiquity it promised a decade ago. And come on ChatGPT is pretty amazing even if it is over hyped.

Hackers are everywhere, they're just doing work and not writing hype posts.

Tech news is all jobs.

I love this article just don't fully agree with it. Love the convo in this post too! Keep it coming.

> If you are hiring “professional fakers” that means you are a poor manager. > Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz.

If the expectation for your average Woz is to handle seasoned bullshitters, how can you expect them to also be hackers?

It's true that VCs and an ossified economy contribute more to the blandness of new companies, but ignoring the problems with the hiring market leaves you with half a picture. I'm not blaming employees for doing what's best for them, but it feels naive and unempathetic to put the blame of aligning incentives to founders, when the problems are systemic.

I think it is entirely fair to say that there probably isnt just one primary way to run a large organization. That’s really the main takeaway I found useful from Paul Graham’s blog post.

He obviously didnt specify at all what other ways are and what this nebulous “founder mode” means. But I think just pointing out hiring an army of consultants and mbas might not be the only way to do it is an important statement to make that I don’t think most people in the corporate world would readily admit to.

The industry is mostly run by opportunists, I refused to make career despite my appetite for low level programming

I have no desire to contribute to this whole circus full for fraudsters

> hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.

This sounds like someone who is looking for someone to blame. If founder after founder is having this problem what are the odds that there is something else going on and perhaps the reports are doing exactly what the founder is rewarding?

I see in a lot of tech companies is a system where all the incentives are about getting promoted. IC's are trying to build things that look big and complex and "hard". Future maintenance burden, product impact, etc are difficult to measure and also super easy to game. All that matters is that they might get promoted so they can jump teams and do it again. Managers are promoted based on headcount and do everything they can to keep reports and grow like weeds. A dysfunctional org? Yes please, let me triple it in size to solve the problem, we have the money and this org is important, and I become important in the process. Sure some (not all) might need to grow the top line by X%, but in a growing industry/product category/company that might be the default so the focus is again on growing their career. They spend all their time on hiring and annual reviews and promo committees and almost no time on actual strategy. And getting rid of under performers was difficult and as long of a process as possible because there was no incentive to make that simple.

As long at the tide rises all boats and the CEO rewards this behavior everyone plays this game. When the water starts flowing out suddenly you have a CEO looking around going wtf when everyone did exactly what they incentivized.

Let's not forget that people themselves changed and what is popular. Look at any top show hn post and you'll see all this talk about the market fit, the competitors, and how much money that product can make.

The hackers have disappeared and we're apart of the prohlem.

Should really have a tag rule to prevent any boring business start up bogus discussions when the poster wants.

Indeed. There are not too many people that are both bright and willing to look up to the current crop of tech billionaires.

Ideals count, certainly for hackers. If you have billions in the bank you might start to look to work on some real pressing problems instead of looking to get a share of the next Privacy Suck.

Erosion of democratic societies via algorithmically boosted disinformation campaigns, climate change, healthcare, you name it. Tech is not neutral in the societal sense, far from it.

Also, I doubt if AI (now even more widgets), with those tech leaders pressing for it, is compatible with being a tech enthusiast. Techies like tech first, results second.

If software engineering becomes chess, it will be preserved as tournaments, not business.

> Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz.

Distills the post to a sentence, and boy does this nail it.

To me, the boredom comes from seeing technology inevitably get corrupted. Self-driving cars turn into self-driving ads, and AI is used to displace jobs or track people. Everything we’re promised eventually falls apart, and I’m tired of where it all leads.

The utopia would be an equitable society, where we work far less than our ancestors did, allowing us to focus on pursuing our interests and desires—not just buying security. But not only does that seem unattainable, it's pursuit is considered laziness or opting-out of a social contract whereby 99% of people fight to make 1% rich with the delusion being that maybe it's me that's the 1% and that with the riches I can score I can ride off into the sunset, and get off this foul ride forever.

Makes me sick how far we don fell.

There's still fun hacker spaces out there. The Playdate community is a really fun space because it's mostly non commercial and people just making stuff for the love of it. [0]

The raspberry pi community is also in the hacker space, I think the shortages and the price of the newer products hurt it some but I'm sure the spirit will come back. [1]

Overall I'd say that people spend too much time on the internet and it's effectively a full time job form them but with no breaks, which of course leads to burn out/disappointment. [2]

I'm rambling at this point but maybe there needs to be a hobbiest hackernews or something.

[0] When most stuff is priced $10 at most and they're are onyl at most 100k devices on the market, there is not much money to be made.

[1] I'm still disappointed there is not much of a gamedev/creative software community around the raspberry pi.

[2] And when you read about angry sad things all day because that's how Merchants of Despair keep you on their sites. Well it's hard not to feel angry and sad.

> A good sign that it may be time for a re-shifting of voices in tech

Yes, it would be good to get some domain experts in, rather than people who are comfortable re-hashing press releases with an "trust me, the physics of this perpetual motion machine check out" or "lol they are shit" overlay.

Especially as tech now is moving from a "oh thats a simple idea, just needs executing" to actual "shiut the physics of this make it super hard" (ie AR)

When the industry is all about the myth of the trendy tech founder, of course the ones who succeed are the con-men and fabulists. All jobs and no woz indeed

To me it seems like an alternative take on e/acc. It’s either become a fatalist or just do stuff. “F it we ball” vs it is what it is.

Best quote I will use is: "Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz."

It's a good post but for some reason he decided to end it with a random attack on Paul Graham, which seems weird. It's not really necessary to say this and actually the accusation is slightly ridiculous (how does he know how bright Paul Graham thinks Paul Graham is?). Not good judgment to include this in the post, and undermines the rest of it for me a bit.

But this outcome shouldn't be surprising.

In the beginning, the industry was dominated by nerds and hackers who were passionate about tech. Then those with business acumen noticed that this could make them very rich, and swooped in to "help out" those hackers, who, being fair, probably wouldn't be able to run a successful business on their own. But there are also examples of hackers themselves getting business savvy, and business people becoming tech oriented, and many combinations in between.

While the Silicon Valley, VC funded, hypergrowth mentality is incredibly toxic, I think you'll find many examples in the industry across this spectrum. What we're seeing with crypto, AI, etc. is just the usual hype cycle. This will inevitably be flocked by all types of characters, but we've always had these. Remember the buzz around the early web, the "information superhighway", and the inevitable dot-com bubble? Or the video game crash in the 80s? The same will happen with modern tech. We'll eventually reach the plateau of productivity of these technologies, or they will lose our interest and we'll move on to something else.

"If you are hiring “professional fakers” that means you are a poor manager." Sad to say, but the professional fakers dominate the C-suite. And often the top manager (the CEO) is a professional faker in chief, hiring like others instead of those who really know what they are doing, so that they don't call out the BS of the top levels.

In the current corporate model that dominates modern capitalism, it's the shit that floats to the top. I am hopeful of a future of mass self-employment and away from finance-led, quarterly-focused, bottom-line driven corporations that stray from their missions and seek to serve a minority of overweighted shareholders, at the expense of employees, customers, and the "common" shareholder.

The author of the post, Ian Betteridge, makes this statement:

"But the other reason why the whole founder mode 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."

However, the about page on his blog and his LinkedIn indicates he has zero experience running any companies, small or large. Am I missing something?

https://ianbetteridge.com/about/

The best way to know if someone’s lost an argument is when they start hurling insults.

My main criticism of this article and the article it references is that it refers to Marc Andreessen as a “not-so-bright billionaire” who “doesn’t build shit”. Do people forgot that he built the first popular web browser (mosaic) and then built Netscape? He is much more part of “hacker” culture than other names mentioned.

I do like the point about lack of experience hiring leading to bad hires.

In "Endurance", there's a short note on how shackleton hired crew members for his expedition. Seemingly on a whim and a 5 minute chat. I interpreted that as deep experience of his area combined with a keen sense of judging people. They combined to work magic. That kind of thing takes a lot of time.

From a post I saw in another thread, I don't know how to link to the direct comment:

>

"Same year for me. My college experience was a mix of PCU, Animal House, Hackers and Real Genius (ok not quite). I first saw email in a Pine terminal client. Netscape had been freshly ripped off from NCSA Mosaic at my alma mater UIUC the year before. Hacks, warez, mods, music and even Photoshop were being shared in public folders on the Mac LocalTalk network with MB/sec download speeds 4 years before Napster and 6 years before BitTorrent. Perl was the new hotness, and PHP wouldn't be mainstream until closer to 2000. Everyone and their grandma was writing HTML for $75/hr and eBay was injecting cash into young people's pockets (in a way that can't really be conveyed today except using Uber/Lyft and Bitcoin luck as examples) even though PayPal wouldn't be invented for another 4 years. Self-actualization felt within reach, 4 years before The Matrix and Fight Club hit theaters. To say that there was a feeling of endless possibility is an understatement.

So what went wrong in the ~30 years since? The wrong people won the internet lottery.

Instead of people who are visionaries like Tim Berners-Lee and Jimmy Wales working to pay it forward and give everyone access to the knowledge and resources they need to take us into the 21st century, we got Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk who sink capital into specific ego-driven goals, mostly their own.

What limited progress we see today happened in spite of tech, not because of it.

So everything we see around us, when viewed through this lens, is tainted:

  - AI (only runs on GPUs not distributed high-multicore CPUs maintained by hobbyists)
  - VR (delayed by the lack of R&D spending on LCDs and blue LEDs after the Dot Bomb)
  - Smartphones (put desktop computing on the back burner for nearly 20 years)
  - WiFi (locked down instead of run publicly as a peer to peer replacement for the internet backbone, creating a tragedy of the commons)
  - 5G (again, locked down proprietary networks instead of free and public p2p)
  - High speed internet (inaccessible for many due to protectionist lobbying efforts by ISP duopolies)
  - Solar panels (delayed ~20 years due to the Bush v Gore decision and 30% Trump tariff)
  - Electric vehicles (delayed ~20 years for similar reasons, see Who Killed the Electric Car)
  - Lithium batteries (again delayed ~20 years, reaching mainstream mainly due to Obama's reelection in 2012)
  - Amazon (a conglomeration of infrastructure that could have been public, see also Louis De Joy and the denial of electric vehicles for the US Postal Service)
  - SpaceX (a symptom of the lack of NASA funding and R&D in science, see For All Mankind on Apple TV)
  - CRISPR (delayed 10-20 years by the shuttering of R&D after the Dot Bomb, see also stem cell research delayed by concerns over abortion)
  - Kickstarter (only allows a subset of endeavors, mainly art and video games)
  - GoFundMe (a symptom of the lack of public healthcare in the US)
  - Patreon (if it worked you'd be earning your primary income from it)

Had I won the internet lottery, my top goal would have been to reduce suffering in the world by open sourcing (and automating the production of) resources like education, food and raw materials. I would work towards curing all genetic diseases and increasing longevity. Protecting the environment. Reversing global warming. Etc etc etc.

The world's billionaires, CEOs and Wall Street execs do none of those things. The just roll profits into ever-increasing ventures maximizing greed and exploitation while they dodge their taxes.

Is it any wonder that the web tools we depend upon every day from the status quo become ever-more complex, separating us from our ability to get real work done? Or that all of the interesting websites require us to join or submit our emails and phone numbers? Or that academic papers are hidden behind paywalls? Or that social networks and electronic devices are eavesdropping on our conversations?"

Me again:

It's definitely boring. All the good stuff is hidden behind $50 subscriptions (or whatever), hacker culture from what I've seen (and being alone most of my day) is everybody just working their jobs then disappearing or heading on to video games/a distraction.

It's ..something.

Definitely a bore fest. I like smallweb stuff. Cool projects, seeing things.

We went the wrong way.

Is this the original talk?

https://youtu.be/s3IhbJDFs5E