I think the key difference is that a founder has a much better understanding of the company as a complex system. This understanding includes not just how people think it works at a certain point. It includes all the previous attempts, reasoning behind those attemps, the context of past failures and successes, the personal dynamics behind those choices.

Complex systems are notoriously hard to understand. Seeing the system develop from zero to complexity is an experience and perspective that is impossible to replace. Even most early employees don't have a comparable understanding.

Of course not all founders know everything about all the key components of their businesses, but the founding team does have a much much better understanding than other person. I think that's why founders get frustrated with ineffective things. While most others have to account for unknown unknowns and give others benefit of doubt, the founders have a much better and robust understanding of why things happen the way they happen.

The difference between management and leadership may be more about where you focus and how you engage others. Being a founder and being a leader is different in how well you understand the system.

It is perhaps possible to interpret these articles as saying anything whatsoever, but they don't seem to specifically say what Paul's article says.

> There are as far as I know no books specifically about founder mode. Business schools don't know it exists.

> …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.

Founders have to lead themselves and other while going from 0 to 1.

I’m not sure what you are saying is accurate.

Even if Paul was rewriting a topic… more than one writer writes about a topic for their readers, no?

The MBA form of management using people as process .. is increasingly less applicable and in need of updating .. where software increasingly can push papers and connect people and processes.

We don’t see this much in management consulting or MBAs very much. Maybe there’s a benefit to leaving how the world was.

There’s a saying (which I’m sure has an English equivalent) where I live that goes something like “It’s the owner’s gaze which fattens the cow”.

Owner vs manager is the original “AI alignment problem”, usually taught as the principal-agent problem in business schools, and is very real. SV-type founders are, by and large, meaningful owners in their enterprises and thus heavily invested (literally) in the company’s performance. Professional managers, leaders or not, are just selling their labor. There is a whole field of management science about designing proper compensation structures to make CEOs better aligned with shareholders, but you get that quicker by making them the same person.

Of course there’s a whole other world of majority shareholders leveraging their position to extract value from minority shareholders, which is just another version of the same problem.

All this to say, you’re right that there’s prior art about what he’s writing, but its the principal-agent problem, not leaders vs managers, and in general business literature does not equate the issue of founder ownership with the PA-problem (obviously any undergrad can link the two issues, but that’s not how they’re usually approached)

I'm not sure it is.

Let's look at those three links:

1. The first of these dovetails -- not the same, but on the same hunt -- with Graham's piece, and is an excellent read.

- Unconventional wisdom

2. The second is formulaic anecdata consultjunk, the same method incurious journalists use covering politics through "focus groups".

- Conventional wisdom

3. The third uses the same formula, and while more effort (think "polling" or "survey" instead of "focus group") in an attempt to elevate from anecdata to study, seems not to have read or understood the first.

This third one is also contrary to the (often rejected while not yet disproven) theories* of Elliot Jacques, that people have sweet spot time horizons, and most can only flex +/- 2 horizons. As this article bullet lists (because of course) how to "shift from a leader/manager mindset to a lead/manage one and balance the two skillsets" it applies solely the manager rubric to action, through the lens of a manager that doesn't understand Graham's piece or the first article, almost irreconcilable with Graham's stance or the first HBR piece.

- Conventional wisdom (orthodoxy, even)

PG article and first link are not conventional wisdom, though it might sound that way to Taylorist thinking.

- - -

Perhaps the lack of awareness Graham keeps noting is to be expected.

Seems unusual for serial startup entrepreneurs who have built firms from $0 to $B to have also individually joined and worked up to C-level in "institutions" (50+ years old, and 5K - 100K+ employees, not just other tech unicorns still bearing Founder imprints) after learning the startup experience that lets them see management practice through a "it doesn't have to be like this" lens, making it rare to find the perspective necessary to delve into Graham's take or the difference between these three HBR articles.

Perhaps it's not only that management culture is a distorted bubble (PG: "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").

Perhaps it's that founders with institutional perspective are themselves unicorns.

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Footnote:

* Elliott Jaques' "Stratified Systems Theory of Requisite Organization" suggests that individuals have a natural "sweet spot" time horizon for decision-making at work (which should align with the time horizon of the decisions' scope and impact), and most can only communicate up or manage down within a range of one or two levels above or below their own optimal horizon. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requisite_organization