本文是Paul Graham根据Airbnb创始人Brian Chesky在YC event的讲话延伸出的一篇文章。

原文：Founder mode

译文如下：

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.
在上周的 YC 活动中，布莱恩·切斯基 (Brian Chesky) 发表了一场让所有在场的人都记得的演讲。后来我采访过的大多数创始人都说这是他们听过的最好的。罗恩·康威有生以来第一次忘记做笔记。我不会尝试在这里重现它。相反，我想谈谈它提出的一个问题。

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.
布莱恩演讲的主题是，关于如何经营大公司的传统智慧是错误的。随着 Airbnb 的发展，好心人建议他必须以某种方式经营公司才能扩大规模。他们的建议可以乐观地概括为“雇用优秀的人才并给他们空间来完成自己的工作”。他听从了这个建议，但结果却是灾难性的。因此，他必须自己找出更好的方法，他通过研究史蒂夫·乔布斯（Steve Jobs）如何管理苹果公司来做到这一点。到目前为止，它似乎正在发挥作用。 Airbnb 的自由现金流利润率目前在硅谷名列前茅。

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.
这次活动的观众包括很多我们资助过的最成功的创始人，纷纷表示同样的事情也发生在他们身上。他们在公司成长过程中得到了同样的关于如何经营公司的建议，但这不但没有帮助他们的公司，反而损害了他们。

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.
为什么每个人都告诉这些创始人错误的事情？这对我来说是一个很大的谜团。经过一番思考，我找到了答案：他们被告知的是如何经营一家不是你创办的公司——如果你只是一名职业经理人，如何经营一家公司。但这个做法效率低得多，以至于对创始人来说感觉很糟糕。有些事情创始人可以做而管理者却做不到，而且不做这些事情对创始人来说是错误的，因为事实确实如此。

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.
实际上，有两种不同的公司经营方式：创始人模式和经理模式。到目前为止，即使是在硅谷，大多数人也隐含地认为，扩大初创公司规模意味着切换到经理模式。但我们可以从尝试过这种模式的创始人的沮丧以及他们尝试摆脱这种模式的成功来推断另一种模式的存在。

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.
据我所知，还没有专门关于创始人模式的书籍。商学院不知道它的存在。到目前为止，我们所拥有的只是个别创始人的实验，他们一直在自己解决这个问题。但现在我们知道我们要寻找什么，我们就可以搜索它了。我希望几年后创始人模式将像管理者模式一样被理解。我们已经可以猜测它会有一些不同。

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.
管理者被教导的公司运营方式，似乎就像模块化设计一样，把组织结构图中的子部门视为黑盒。你告诉你的直接下属要做什么，然后由他们来决定如何做。但你不会参与他们所做的事情的细节。这将是对他们进行微观管理，这很糟糕。

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.
雇用优秀的人才并为他们提供完成工作的空间。这样描述听起来很棒，不是吗？但在实践中，从一个又一个创始人的报告来看，这往往意味着：雇佣职业造假者，让他们把公司推向地下。

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]
在Brian的演讲中以及后来与创始人交谈时，我注意到的一个主题是关于被“洗脑”的想法。创始人感觉自己受到了来自双方的压力——人们告诉他们必须像经理一样经营公司，而当他们这么做时为他们工作的人则受到影响。通常，当你周围的每个人都不同意你的观点时，你的默认假设应该是你错了。但这是罕见的例外之一。自己没有当过创始人的风险投资人不知道创始人应该如何经营公司，而C级高管作为一个阶层，包括一些世界上最熟练的骗子。 [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.
无论创始人模式由什么组成，很明显，它都会打破首席执行官只能通过他或她的直接下属与公司接触的原则。 “越级”会议将成为常态，而不是一种非常不寻常的做法，以至于有一个名字。一旦你放弃了这个限制，就有大量的排列可供选择。

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 (Steve Jobs) 曾经为他认为苹果公司最重要的 100 名员工举办年度静修会，而这些人并不是组织结构图中排名最高的 100 名员工。你能想象普通公司需要多大的意志力才能做到这一点吗？但想象一下这样的东西会有多有用。它可以让一家大公司感觉像一家初创公司。如果这些静修不起作用，史蒂夫大概就不会继续进行这些静修了。但我从未听说过其他公司这样做。那么这是一个好主意还是坏主意呢？我们仍然不知道。这就是我们对创始人模式知之甚少的原因。 [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，创始人不能继续以 20 人时的方式管理一家 2000 人的公司。必须有一定程度的授权。自主权的边界最终在哪里，以及边界有多清晰，可能因公司而异。当经理赢得信任时，他们甚至会在同一家公司内不时发生变化。所以创始人模式会比管理者模式更复杂。但它也会发挥更好的作用。我们已经从个别创始人摸索的例子中知道了这一点。

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]
事实上，我对创始人模式的另一个预测是，一旦我们弄清楚它是什么，我们就会发现许多个人创始人已经在很大程度上达到了这种模式——除了在做他们所做的事情时，他们被视为许多人都是古怪的，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.
奇怪的是，我们对创始人模式知之甚少，这是一个令人鼓舞的想法。看看创始人已经取得的成就，但他们是在糟糕的建议的逆风下取得了这一成就。想象一下，一旦我们能够告诉他们如何像史蒂夫·乔布斯而不是约翰·斯卡利那样经营自己的公司，他们会做什么。

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.
[1] 用更外交的方式来表述这一说法是，经验丰富的 C 级高管通常非常擅长向上管理。我认为任何了解这个世界的人都会对此提出异议。

[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] 如果这种务虚会的做法变得如此普遍，甚至连政治主导的成熟公司也开始这样做，我们就可以通过受邀者在组织结构图上的平均深度来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.
[3] 我还有另一个不太乐观的预测：创始人模式的概念一旦确立，人们就会开始误用它。那些连应该委托的事情都无法委托的创始人会以创始人模式为借口。或者不是创始人的管理者会决定他们应该尝试像创始人一样行事。在某种程度上，这甚至可能有效，但如果不起作用，结果就会很混乱；模块化方法至少限制了糟糕的首席执行官可能造成的损害。

Thanks to Brian Chesky, Patrick Collison, Ron Conway, Jessica Livingston, Elon Musk, Ryan Petersen, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this.