<
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/11/opinion/silicon-valley-musk-trump-andreessen.html>
"Silicon Valley’s current fascination with a trendy management meme illustrates
a broader and more troubling turn in certain powerful pockets of its culture —
one that has seized our politics and could even unduly influence our election
(again).
I’m talking about founder mode. A recently coined management style being
celebrated by some venture capitalists, it embraces the notion that a company’s
founder must make decisions unilaterally rather than partner with direct
reports or frontline employees. All too often the extension of founder mode is
to resist not only internal checks and balances but also those from the
government.
I see founder mode as another expression of a creeping attraction to one-man
rule in some corners of tech. (I use “man” intentionally, as only 3 percent of
venture capital funding goes to solo female founders.) This
neo-authoritarianism is nothing short of a rejection of the historical values
that made Silicon Valley what it is today. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised
that a handful of the wealthiest and most powerful venture capitalists there
are throwing their resources behind the re-election of Donald Trump.
This view of the world is the antithesis of what I most love about Silicon
Valley, which has its roots in a rebellious anti-authoritarianism. In 1957
eight engineers quit Shockley Semiconductor and founded Fairchild
Semiconductor, which built transistors and integrated circuits, because they
were frustrated by their boss’s megalomaniacal refusal to listen to them. Then
in 1968 two of those founders, frustrated by the way their bosses at Fairchild
were treating them, quit to start a chipmaker called Intel.
In that original recipe, venture capitalists invested in founders rebelling
against established hierarchy and building great products. And when those
rebels themselves became too hierarchical, venture capitalists turned to new
founders aspiring to overtake the old order. When rebels became kings, they got
deposed. Command and control kills innovation.
That history explains why, in the early days of Google, its founders, Larry
Page and Sergey Brin, wanted to avoid becoming despotic bosses, no matter how
much the company grew. At first they eliminated engineering manager roles, only
to learn that chaos is just as bad as autocratic leadership. So they opted for
checks and balances, electing to build management systems that systematically
stripped unilateral decision-making authority from all managers — all the way
up to the founders and chief executive. At Google the idea of one-person rule
seemed illogical and bound to fail. Why hire the smartest people in the world,
only to refuse steadfastly to listen to a word they say?
Founder mode invokes Steve Jobs, revealing a misunderstanding of what made
Apple’s chief executive legendary. Edwin Catmull, a co-founder of Pixar and a
close associate, says Mr. Jobs failed when he acted like a jerk and succeeded
when he learned to be a better manager and learned to work with great leaders
like Tim Cook, then his chief operating officer, now Apple’s chief executive.
Mr. Jobs 2.0 said, “We hire people to tell us what to do, not the other way
around.”"
Via Bill Daul.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
