The essay that rebranded micromanagement

⌛ Hello again! We’re 67.84% of our way through 2024.
Issue #157: how to interview well, the myth of breaking through, and personal perspectives on Gaza
By Harris Sockel

Last weekend, computer scientist and Y Combinator founder Paul Graham published an instantly viral essay on how to lead (and not lead!) a team. It’s called “Founder Mode” and I’m oversimplifying it wildly, but he essentially says (don’t @ me): Micromanagement can be good.

Conventional management orthodoxy is “hire great people, give them autonomy, and get out of their way!” but Graham thinks that’s terrible advice for founders. He doesn’t mince words, calling most professional managers “fakers” and “liars.” The more diplomatic way to put this is they’re better at managing up than managing down. Leaders in Founder Mode, on the other hand, work with whoever is closest to the problem — even if that person is at the bottom of the org chart.

Graham got the idea from Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, who claims delegating to professional managers nearly tanked his company. On Medium, CTO Zakwan Jaroucheh describes Founder Mode as staying as close to your product as possible; he recalls a time when outsourcing a component to a third-party didn’t work, so he started coding it himself, which led to a slew of breakthroughs. Investor Amir Shevat disagrees with Graham’s essay and sees Founder Mode as a cop-out: an excuse for leaders who haven’t done the work of hiring people they trust.

I’d be remiss to ignore all the memes, most of which predicted CEOs will use “Founder Mode” as a tacit excuse to steamroll their employees. Chesky himself acknowledged how gendered this conversation is — women with hands-on leadership styles are perceived differently than men. Either way, the essay seemed to unlock a new conversation about when micromanagement might actually be useful.

⚡ Lighting round: Memorable, recent Medium stories in 1 sentence or less.

• Here are two perspectives on the war in Gaza, one from a writer in Israel processing the ongoing protests against the Israeli government (“We were a country divided before this happened, with unrest and protests and anger and disillusionment”) and one from a Palestinian American (“I still feel conflicted at times about being open with my Palestinian identity”).
• Translator Yuri Minamide explains why Murakami is so popular in the U.S.: His writing style came about via translation; the novelist was dissatisfied with how his stories sounded in Japanese, so he translated them to English and then back, which gave them a whole new sound.
• Engineering leader Marianne Bellotti lists the best questions to ask when you’re interviewing for a job, including: “Let’s say I’m the person you hire. 6 months have gone by, what’s different?”

💥 One piece of practical wisdom: about breaking through

If you’re still curious about cognitive biases after last week’s deep-dive, let me introduce you to the breakthrough fallacy. We trace major changes in our lives back to isolated turning points, when in reality those changes were likely “contextual, circumstantial, slow and arduous, and in some cases, possibly not even conscious.”

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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

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