 September 2024 2024 年 9 月 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. 在上週的 YC 活動中，布萊恩·切斯基發表了一場每位在場的人都會記得的演講。我之後與大多數創始人交談，他們表示這是他們聽過的最佳演講。羅恩·康威生平第一次忘記做筆記。我不打算在這裡重現演講內容。相反，我想談談它引發的一個問題。 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. 布萊恩演講的主題是，關於如何經營大型公司的傳統智慧是錯誤的。隨著 Airbnb 的成長，善意的人們建議他必須以某種方式經營公司才能擴展。他們的建議可以樂觀地總結為「雇用優秀的人，並給他們空間去做他們的工作。」他遵循了這個建議，結果卻是災難性的。因此，他不得不自己找出更好的方法，部分是通過研究史蒂夫·喬布斯如何經營蘋果公司。到目前為止，這似乎是有效的。Airbnb 的自由現金流利潤率現在在矽谷中名列前茅。 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. 這次活動的觀眾中包括了許多我們資助過的最成功的創始人，他們一個接一個地表示，這種情況也發生在他們身上。他們在公司成長過程中收到了相同的建議，但這些建議並沒有幫助他們的公司，反而對他們造成了損害。 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. 為什麼大家都在告訴這些創始人錯誤的事情？這對我來說是一個大謎團。在思考了一段時間後，我找到了答案：他們被告知的是如何經營一個你沒有創立的公司——如果你只是專業經理，該如何經營一家公司。但這種做法對創始人來說效果差得多，讓他們感覺不對勁。創始人能做的事情是經理無法做到的，而不去做這些事情對創始人來說感覺是錯誤的，因為確實如此。 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. 實際上，經營一家公司有兩種不同的方式：創始人模式和經理模式。到目前為止，即使在矽谷，大多數人也隱含地認為擴大初創企業意味著轉向經理模式。但我們可以從那些嘗試過經理模式的創始人的失望，以及他們成功逃離這種模式的嘗試中推斷出另一種模式的存在。 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. 據我所知，並沒有專門關於創始人模式的書籍。商學院並不知道它的存在。我們目前所擁有的只是一些個別創始人的實驗，他們一直在自己摸索。但現在我們知道我們在尋找什麼，我們可以開始搜尋。我希望在幾年內，創始人模式能像管理者模式一樣被充分理解。我們已經可以猜測它將在某些方面有所不同。 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. 管理者被教導如何經營公司的方式似乎像模組化設計，因為你將組織圖的子樹視為黑箱。你告訴你的直接下屬該做什麼，然後由他們自己去弄清楚如何去做。但你不會介入他們所做的細節。那樣會變成微觀管理，這是不好的。 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. 雇用優秀的人才，並給他們空間去做他們的工作。這樣描述聽起來很棒，不是嗎？但根據創始人們的報告，實際上這往往意味著：雇用專業的偽裝者，讓他們把公司拖入深淵。 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] 我注意到布萊恩的演講以及與創始人交談時的一個主題是被操控的概念。創始人感覺自己正受到雙方的操控——一方面是那些告訴他們必須像經理一樣經營公司的人的影響，另一方面是當他們這樣做時，為他們工作的人。通常，當你周圍的每個人都與你意見不合時，你的默認假設應該是你錯了。但這是少數例外之一。沒有自己當過創始人的風險投資家不知道創始人應該如何經營公司，而作為一個群體，C 級高管中有一些是世界上最擅長說謊的人。 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. 無論創始人模式包含什麼，很明顯它將打破首席執行官應僅通過其直接下屬與公司互動的原則。“跳級”會議將成為常態，而不是一種如此不尋常以至於有專門名稱的做法。一旦你放棄這一限制，將有大量的選擇組合可供選擇。 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·喬布斯曾經為他認為的蘋果公司 100 位最重要的人舉辦年度靜修會，而這 100 人並不是在組織架構中排名最高的那 100 人。你能想像在一家普通公司中做到這一點需要多大的意志力嗎？然而，想像一下這樣的做法會有多有用。它可以讓一家大公司感覺像一家初創公司。史蒂夫如果這些靜修會沒有成效，想必不會一直舉辦。但我從未聽說過其他公司這樣做過。所以這是一個好主意，還是壞主意？我們仍然不知道。這就是我們對創始人模式了解得如此之少的原因。 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. 顯然，創始人無法以 20 人公司的方式繼續經營一個 2000 人的公司。必須進行一定程度的授權。自主權的邊界最終會在哪裡，以及它們的明確程度，可能會因公司而異。即使在同一家公司內，隨著管理者贏得信任，這些邊界也會不時變化。因此，創始人模式將比管理者模式更為複雜，但也會運作得更好。我們已經從個別創始人摸索前進的例子中知道了這一點。 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] 確實，我對創始人模式的另一個預測是，一旦我們弄清楚它是什麼，我們會發現許多個別創始人已經走了大半的路——只不過在他們所做的事情上，許多人將他們視為古怪或更糟。 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，這是一個令人鼓舞的想法，我們對創始人模式仍然知之甚少。看看創始人們已經取得的成就，然而他們是在不利的壞建議下取得這些成就的。想像一下，當我們能告訴他們如何像史蒂夫·喬布斯那樣經營公司，而不是像約翰·斯卡利那樣時，他們將會做出什麼。 Notes [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. 更具外交手腕的表達方式是說，經驗豐富的高層主管通常非常擅長向上管理。我認為，對這個領域有了解的人都不會對此提出異議。 [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. 如果舉辦這種靜修的做法變得如此普遍，以至於即使是被政治主導的成熟公司也開始這樣做，我們可以通過受邀者在組織圖上的平均層級來量化公司的衰老程度。 [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. 我還有另一個不太樂觀的預測：一旦創始人模式的概念確立，人們就會開始濫用它。那些無法委派應該委派的事情的創始人會以創始人模式作為藉口。或者那些不是創始人的經理會決定他們應該嘗試像創始人一樣行事。這在某種程度上可能會奏效，但當它不奏效時，結果會很混亂；模組化的方法至少可以限制一位糟糕的首席執行官所能造成的損害。 Thanks to Brian Chesky, Patrick Collison, Ron Conway, Jessica Livingston, Elon Musk, Ryan Petersen, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this. |