[JakeSc]

As both a 4x founder and recovering manager-of-managers, I have to say Founder-vs.-Manager is a bit of a false dichotomy.

Interestingly, the most successful managers I've seen have themselves been founders. They had both autonomy and organizational trust, and also tenacious creativity, which led to significant successes. This binary notion of "are you a Manager™ or are you a Founder™?" is a false dichotomy and leaves great people out.

A founder mentality has certain recognizable characteristics: doing whatever it takes to succeed, applying creative solutions to challenging problems, going outside your lane to win, and putting in energy well beyond the standard 9-5 expected of a standard employee. You can hire talented people with such qualities AND build an organization with trust and autonomy. Bringing it back to Chesky's disastrous results with delegation, I'd ask this: Did he just hire bad people?

This dichotomy may at worst cause an entire generation of new founders to ignore really fantastic advice, "Hire really great people, and give them the support and space to succeed." This is not antithetical to: "Oh, and those people should look like founders." It's a Both, not One-or-the-Other.

All this said, I do think PG is touching on something super interesting, which is an almost anthropological understanding of "The Founder", and view that as a very important area of discourse and study for the next generation of great companies.

The point that both PG and BC are really trying to say is that rigid, hierarchical employee types are detrimental to company's long-term success, and instead you should be building your team with hungry, bright, and creative problemsolvers who aren't afraid to break artificial rules to succeed. But you sure as hell be building an organization with trust and giving those founder-types everything they need to succeed.

[conductr]

I think the dichotomy is a gross simplification when presented as a single style or piece of advice to be implemented globally. The challenge of the founder is to know what is the truly important part of their product/market and exercise a Founder mode style for those areas. It's where your time as a founder is most valuable. There's reason most of the Steve Jobs tales are from product design perspective. I expect he knew that was, or would be, a significant differentiator of his product. Yet, as his company was scaling he likely was pulled in many more directions regarding other concerns of a scaling company as all founders would be (HR, Accounting, etc), and he knew that's where you exercise Manager mode. Hire a good head of HR and CFO and let them do their job. It's not worth his time to invest much effort in those types of functional minutia although they are very important and necessary parts of scaling.