题记

看到Paul Graham的新文章，很有意思。回想起《黑客与画家》里的内容，感觉这篇Founder Mode 与书里创造者的品味有类似。 大概说的都是同一类人群。 现代的所谓经营管理，起源于泰勒制，管理的对象，是所谓的流水线工人。 然而，目前的有活力的企业，大多数创意或者知识密集的行业。 如何管理这些知识工作者。德鲁克有论述，马奇有论述。Paul这篇文章里有些经验之谈。

面对一个快速迭代的行业，传统的层级制，会有僵化表现。创始人，作为团队里权威，不能轻易退居幕后，那可能变成“房间里的大象”。虽然说选定有担当的人，用人不疑，充分授权。但是，对公司的最终承担者，是创始人。“吾之道，一以贯之”，创始者强力掌舵，可能是前功尽弃。真正志同道合，是少数。三五人已经罕见，公司规模上百，那就人心隔肚皮，不能一厢情愿了。

层级制另一个毛病，就是信息过滤和衰减，经常会扭曲真实的，一线的信息。要在风险环境下，保持团队凝聚和斗志，就不能僵化。生于忧患，死于安乐。 看看《加勒比海盗》，海盗船的团队模式。船长有着绝对权威，同时，船员各有所长。

Paul的原文链接在这里。借助GPT我做了中英文对照。将就将就吧。

Founder Mode （中英对照）

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 YC 活动中，Brian Chesky 发表了一场演讲，所有参与者都对此感到震撼 有的人会记得。后来我和大多数创始人交谈后说 这是他们听过的最好的。罗恩·康威，第一次 在他的生活中，忘记记笔记了。我不打算尝试复制 这里。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. 布莱恩的演讲主题是关于传统智慧的 如何经营更大的公司是错误的。随着 Airbnb 的发展，善意 人们建议他必须以某种方式经营公司 为了扩大规模。他们的建议可以乐观地总结 “雇佣优秀的人才并给予他们发挥的空间。” 他 遵循这个建议，结果是灾难性的。所以他不得不 自己找到更好的方法，部分是通过学习 史蒂夫·乔布斯如何经营苹果。到目前为止，似乎正在起作用。Airbnb 的 自由现金流利润率现在是硅谷最佳之一。

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. 这次活动的观众中包括许多最成功的人 我们资助的创始人们一个接一个地说同样的话 事情发生在他们身上。他们得到了同样的建议。 如何在公司发展壮大的同时运营他们的公司，而不是帮助 他们的公司受到了损害。

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. 为什么所有人都告诉这些创始人错误的事情？那就是 对我来说，这是一个大谜。经过一番思考，我想明白了。 答案是：他们被告知的是如何经营一家公司 你还没有创立 - 如果你只是一个人怎么经营一家公司 专业经理。但这种管理方式效果要差得多。 对创始人来说，这种感觉是破碎的。创始人可以做一些事情。 经理们不能做，而创始人觉得不做是错误的，因为 它是。

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，经营一家公司有两种不同的方式：创始人 模式和管理模式。到目前为止，大多数人甚至在硅谷 隐含地假设，扩大初创企业意味着转向 管理模式。但我们可以推断出另一种模式的存在。 创始人们尝试过后的沮丧和他们的成功 试图逃离它。

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，目前没有专门讨论创始人模式的书籍。 商学院不知道它的存在。到目前为止，我们所拥有的只有 个别创始人的实验，他们一直在摸索 他们自己。但是现在我们知道我们在寻找什么，我们可以 搜索它。我希望在未来几年创始人模式也会变得一样。 被理解为管理模式。我们已经可以猜到其中一些。 它将有所不同的方式。

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. 经理们被教导如何经营公司的方式似乎像模块化 以您将组织结构图的子树视为设计的意义而言 黑匣子。您告诉您的直接下属该做什么，就由他们来做。 让他们自己去弄清楚。但你不要参与细节。 他们所做的事情。那将是对他们进行微观管理，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. 聘请优秀的人才，并给予他们展现才华的空间。听起来不错。 当以这种方式描述时，不是吗？除了在实践中判断 从创始人的报告中，经常会发现这种情况 请意味着：聘请专业的伪造者让他们驱动公司 进入地面。

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. [1] 我注意到布莱恩的讲话和与创始人交谈时都有一个主题 之后是被煤气灯照明的想法。创始人觉得他们像是 被两边的人煽动——告诉他们他们 必须像经理一样经营他们的公司，并由工作的人们 当他们这样做时。通常是当你周围的每个人都不同意时 与你在一起，你的默认假设应该是你错了。 但这是罕见的例外之一。没有当过创始人的风险投资者 他们自己不知道创始人应该如何经营公司，以及 C 级别 高管作为一个阶级，包括一些最熟练的说谎者 世界。 [1]

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. 无论创始人模式包括什么，很明显它正在进行 打破首席执行官应该与公司互动的原则 只能通过他或她的直接下属。“跳级"会议将 成为常态，而不是一种如此不寻常的做法 给它取个名字。一旦你放弃了那个限制，就会有一个巨大的 选择的排列数量。

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. [2] 例如，史蒂夫·乔布斯过去常常组织一年一度的撤退活动 被认为是苹果公司最重要的 100 人，这些人是 不是组织图表上排名前 100 的人。你能想象到吗？ 在普通公司完成这项工作需要多大的意志力？ 然而想象一下这样的东西有多有用。它可以起到很大的作用。 公司感觉像一家初创公司。史蒂夫可能不会保留 如果这些撤退没有起作用，那就没有必要进行。但我从未听说过 另一家公司在做这件事。那么这是个好主意，还是坏主意？我们 仍然不知道。这就是我们对创始人模式了解如此之少的原因。 [2]

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，创始人们无法继续以同样的方式管理一个拥有 2000 人的公司 当它有 20 时，他们运行了它。必须有一定数量。 代表团。自治的边界在哪里结束，以及有多尖。 它们可能会因公司而异。他们甚至 在同一家公司内，经理的收入会随着时间的变化而有所不同 信任。因此，创始人模式将比经理模式更复杂。 但它也会更有效。我们已经从例子中知道这一点。 个别创始人摸索着走向它。

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. [3] 确实，我对创始人模式的另一个预测是 一旦我们弄清楚这是什么，我们会发现有许多个体 创始人们已经走了大部分的路——只是在这样做的过程中 他们所做的事情被许多人视为古怪甚至更糟。 [3]

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. 有趣的是，令人鼓舞的是我们仍然知道这么多 创始人模式了解甚少。看看创始人们取得了什么成就。 已经，然而他们在逆风的情况下取得了这一成就 建议。想象一下，一旦我们告诉他们如何运行，他们会做什么 他们的公司更像史蒂夫·乔布斯，而不是约翰·斯卡利。

Notes 笔记

[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] 这种声明更具外交性的措辞方式将是 说有经验的 C 级高管通常非常擅长 管理向上。我认为任何了解这个世界的人都不会认为 会有人争辩这一点。

[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] 如果举办这样的撤退活动变得如此普遍 即使是由政治主导的成熟公司也开始这样做， 我们可以通过平均深度来量化公司的衰老 在受邀者的组织图上。

[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] 我还有另一个不太乐观的预测：一旦 创始人模式的概念确立后，人们将开始 滥用它。甚至连他们都无法委派的创始人 应该会以创始人模式作为借口。或者那些不是管理者的人。 创始人会决定他们应该尽力表现得像创始人一样。这可能 即使工作，在某种程度上，但结果会变得混乱 不; 模块化方法至少可以限制破坏 首席执行官可以做。