Writing so bad is says nothing over N paragraphs
TL;DR
Paul Graham is not my favourite essayist.
Paragraph by paragraph
A worked example, the beginning of "Founder Mode" by Paul Graham.
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.
Hyping up the rest of the essay, I can get behind that. Bit useless if you don't know the people mentioned though.
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.
Airbnb founder got bad advice, he studied Steve Jobs, his company is doing great.
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.
More people got the same advice and they also think it's bad. We still don't know much about what the advice was exactly? Summarising it as "hire good people and give them room to do their jobs" is too broad, it's not a piece of advice I can take apart, analyse and eventually endorse or not. Not much content so far!
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.
Now we learn that the advice boiled down to "don't run the company if you are merely a professional manager". Beautiful dig in there, but I'm not any wiser after this paragraph, I just know that Mr Graham thinks founders are better than professional managers at running their companies.
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.
False dichotomy and no content! It makes me almost angry, he's attacking the "manager" mode of running a company without saying anything substantial about it.
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.
There are no books about a concept I pulled out of a hat, which I didn't even try to have a good gesture at, no way.
(much more contentless writing, can't do it all)
Overall impressions
I've read that essay multiple times. I can't shake the feeling that it was purposefully written to be devoid of actual content. Mr Graham could've said "I think founder run companies better", share the AirBnb anecdote and we'd all be better for it.
Why do I care / why am I so worked up about it?
Due to Paul Graham influence a lot of people were misled into thinking that his Founder Mode essay was in some way profound, that he found a nugget of truth into how to run a business.
Unfortunately that essay is nothing more that "founders run companies better, trust me I've seen in bro" dressed up in a pompous prose. I feel deceived by a person who claims to be a great essayist, writes up bullshit (in the technical meaning of this word) and uses his fame to waste thousands of hours of people's time.