With some time passed, Bryan and Adam offer a non-hot take on Paul Graham's "Founder Mode" post. While there is plenty to quibble over, there's also the kernel of an important idea: how to balance experience, novel thinking, and limited time? Also stay tuned as they share a years old "ego con".Your hosts were Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:Paul Graham Founder ModeBryan Reflecting on Founder ModeTim O'Reilly How I FailedCamille Fournier Founder Create ManagersBryan Chesky interview we mentionOxF: on Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big ThingSeagull ManagementHow to Castrate a Bull NOT AN ENDORSEMENT; DO NOT READThe ego con: Non-Stop HitzIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
Okay. So this is not a hot take. This is a little bit of a take in that we are talking about something that was very hot two weeks ago. That's right. We, we've been on a two week hiatus and you are our last episode was the RFD episode coming in from Italy, which is great. Or so the image that you generated said. I got confirmation on that one.
And then the internet kind of melted down that next weekend over this Paul Graham piece. Yeah. Founder mode. Yeah.
I can confess. I was a little glad we had a hiatus. That piece came out. You wrote a nice blog post. Other folks were chatting about it. I was glad. For a moment that we'd have to talk about it. Okay.
We're obviously in a safe space. I was glad. No way. I was glad. I was glad. I thought like I was glad because I'm just like, I need to get on with my life. This thing has like this piece hit just hits a lot of nerves. Yeah. And it gets a lot of people talking about it, tons of comments on Hacker News.
Normally, when you get that much comments, one of the things I like about Hacker News is when you get a lot of comments on things. When the comments exceed the upvotes, a story gets more or less automatically killed. It gets automatically removed from the front page, which I actually think is a great... A great, very simple algorithm. Yeah, indicator of hot-taken-ness or whatever. Hot-taken-ness.
An indicator of we've got a lot of discussion going, but people aren't actually reading the underlying article. I always thought that was super elegant. But in this case, it was getting a lot of comments, a lot of upvotes. And so this thing is just going and going. I mean, I read it. I'm like... Don't think about it. Don't think about it. Don't think about it. Still thinking about it.
So I have to write a hacker news comment, write a hacker news comment. Like now I'm done. Don't think about it. Still thinking about it. Still thinking about it. Got to write a blog entry. And I've learned that it's just like, I can't fight that at that point. Like I got to go. It's, it's just gonna be faster for me to write the goddamn thing and be done with it. And, um, I, I,
Wrote the blog entry. Was kind of debating, is this on a personal blog or did I put this on the Oxide blog? But I'm like, you know, I need to get Steve's fingerprints on this and get it on the Oxide. Because obviously I want to. It actually was helpful getting the Oxide blog. It actually helped me. There's some things I probably. Dialed down a little bit. Dialed down a little bit.
Yeah, dialed down a little bit. Not, you know, not hugely, but I think dialed down. I mean, so you're abroad when you read the piece. Yes. And what is your take on, on the piece other than like, thank God we're not recording tomorrow.
I mean, first, I mean, first three reactions were, thank God we're not. And they got our brain next week. And you're saying, and you saying like, you didn't want to talk about it. I was like, I'm just going to mute notifications against Brian DMS me or something. I'm just, I'm off the grid. It felt so. So Paul Graham's piece is,
felt so nonspecific that it was going to be inevitably used as a justification for founders to do whatever they wanted. Yeah. To rationalize whatever sort of like terrible decisions were being made or whatever cultural decisions had been made with very, almost a justification for a lack of introspection. And I mean, that's probably what rankled you so much too.
It's just like it, that that's what grinds so much. The, the, these, these kind of little aphorisms that people say, I'm going to do it my way because conventional wisdom is tautologically busted and therefore founder mode. Therefore, founder mode.
Yeah, and I think the one thing I will say in Graham's defense is he anticipates this a little bit. Okay. He indicates that, he's like, in one of the footnotes in particular, I have another less optimistic prediction.
As soon as the concept of founder mode becomes established, little did you know that this would happen within literal minutes of this thing getting out there, people will start misusing it. Founders who are unable to delegate even things that they should will use founder mode as an excuse. I thought that was a good moment of reflection for Paul Graham.
Yeah. I mean, sort of. I don't know.
We're in the mirror neuron empathy preschool over here with Silicon Valley. You got to be like, good job, Paul Graham. Good job. Can everyone give Paul a round of applause for his act of empathy? Okay, no. Sam, stop it. No. Elon. Elon. Get back here. I do think it's interesting that Elon... Did you see the list of people that reviewed this, please? Including Elon Musk.
reviewed the article before he, before he posted it. Yes. No, I did not see that. Yes. Thanks to Brian Chesky. Fine. Patrick Collison. Fine. Ron Conway. Fine. Jessica Livingston. Makes sense. Elon Musk.
Wait.
Yeah.
All right. Good. And I like, what are you on Musk's comments? Yeah. I mean, probably just copy editing. Is it just, it's a kind of another type of like, is there any, is there anything substantive that you have any substantive complaints? It's just like, that's a very close read. Um, I think we're thinking of our comments for one another. On any document. Both guilty of it. That's right.
That's fair. I was very surprised that Elon Musk, and I would love to know, is Elon Musk like, I don't know, don't you feel it needs more Nazi in here? Just feels like... Just 10%. I'm just like, it's just a joke. I mean, those jokes are funny. Who knows? I don't know. I think that was good that he anticipated that. But I guess we should describe the piece in terms of what...
What is the dichotomy that Graham sees? Because ultimately, this is reductive, and it generates this galactic dichotomy between founder mode and manager mode, and there is nothing in the middle.
Yeah. I mean, the term manager mode feels like so easily pejorative. You know what I mean? Oh, it's super easy pejorative. Yes. Like managers are the enemy. Yes. It's like, do you want to be manager? And as much as founder mode is such like a great mean nothing aphorism that you could use to potentially justify behavior, management mode is such like a Just such a burn, right? It is such a burn.
It's like if you were saying something in a meeting and someone was like, oh, nice management mode there. Yeah, be like, oh, never mind. I'm leaving.
Oh, I'd say, hey, let's all go into management mode here. Adam wants us to go into management mode, so everybody give a status update because apparently that's what we need to do. We're in management mode now. I know. It feels very dismissive. Yeah. And it feels dismissive of expertise, which I think... And again, it creates this kind of false dichotomy around expertise.
Like, expertise is tautologically not founder mode.
Spot on. And I think that... I'm sure you've seen this from VCs, like... There's so little weight often put on experience and expertise and the past. I've talked to VCs who say, I only want to work with founders who can conjure things from first principles. And I think there is something valuable to that. There is something valuable to saying, I'm just going to educate myself on a topic.
But it's just so dismissive of everything that came before. Oh, absolutely. And there was a time in my career when I got hit up by recruiters for this one particular role. And the role was usually founder CTO who couldn't manage 10 people. Now the team was 100 people. And they wanted to bring me in.
And the CTO wanted to... To be fair, there's another pejorative that's in the Silicon Valley VC lexicon of the first adult.
No, that's totally, that's right. It was kind of first adult mold, but almost to a person, the CTO would kind of describe the role as like, we've got this cake. I enjoy eating cake, but mostly I like eating frosting. So I'm going to lick off all the frosting. And then I thought you as the first adult would enjoy eating the rest of the cake.
Like someone's got to, someone's got to lick the frosting and someone's got to do something with the rest of this thing. I don't really want it. And so is this like, okay, I think this role is being foisted upon you. I don't think you're totally bought into this role.
And William, that the buying in process was clearly them saying like, you'll still be able to like gorge yourself on frosting. Don't worry. Like it's like, Right. Like you, you only like the process. And I remember this one company in particular plaid where the founders talked to me, young guys. Oh God. No, they were great. They were, they were, they were fantastic.
And they were like, we want to hire people who can help us see around corners. Like we don't want to have to be like encounter every mistake that uh, the hard way. That is great. Yeah. We want to, we want to learn from the mistakes other folks have made. Uh, and I, I just found it to be so, and like, so terrific. I would say the Collison brothers are similar in that regard.
Yeah. Yeah. The, the, where they kind of surprisingly like seeking wisdom out of others, I think is actually an, it's unfortunate that it is so unusual a trade, especially in a company that's enjoyed some early success. Yeah. Because they are being kind of implicitly, and this is the dichotomy that's created.
What we should be encouraging people to do is seek out that wisdom and then make your own decision. Instead, it's like, find an adult. It's like, all right, I guess that makes me the child. I mean, it's the same dichotomy, but from the other perspective of the founder as a child and the professional management. And so how did the plan thing work out? Did they want to...
Well, for me, it turned out very poorly.
Did you know?
Actually, the way it turned out for me, well, Plaid turned out gangbusters. Right, exactly. I mean, put that in, I think I've talked about my poor financial decisions in the past. It turned out, as I thought about it harder, I was just not interested in the problem space. Every engineer I spoke with there was meticulous about personal finances, loved it as a hobby almost.
That sounds like a great fit for, no, wait a minute, that's not a great fit for me. Well, I was like, I've never balanced my checkbook. I only sort of know what that means to do as an activity. So I just realized that the problem space was not a good match.
That's a great... That's actually an honest story to tell yourself. Because it's so tempting to be like, God, I talked to those guys early. Like they really, we really wanted to make a connection. I walked away from it. It's a multi-billion dollar company. I would be like a billionaire.
It's like, well, no, maybe you would be like bored, miserable and would have left after six months or I would have fucked everything up or like actually plans on a multi-billion dollar company because it's run by a guy who like, like the CTO doesn't know how to balance a checkbook. He only knows what that means in the abstract. Right. So, but interesting.
So they were, they were actually really actively seeking that wisdom. I think it's a very unusual.
Yeah. Unusual, especially like, I think these guys were in their late twenties at the time. Very unusual. I think. Yeah, exactly.
And I was really impressed. We should be encouraging that a lot more. Cause I think that like the, the big problem, I mean, I had a couple of big problems with the piece, but the non-specificity is like first among them of this is like, too reductive. And it's very important to remember that Paul Graham has started a successful company. It is called Y Combinator.
Like, via web, I'm sorry, we're just not going down to via web as a model for what companies should aspire to do. And I think that the... understand that most of his perspective comes from starting Y Combinator. And so he is getting this kind of hearsay from founders and then deliberately trying to be reductive about it. And as a result, you're losing a lot of nuance and detail.
And I think that for folks that are interested, I think, and my first kind of tweet on this, my first attempt to think about this only briefly is, was linking to Tim O'Reilly's piece, How I Failed. And I mean, I think this is a piece that I actually had read and then couldn't find again. Huh.
And I actually DMed Tim about it because I'm like, you know, you wrote a piece years ago and it had a real influence on me and I can't find it. And it turns out it was a LinkedIn post. That's why I couldn't find it. And then he gave me some terms to search on and I think then O'Reilly actually kind of finally put it up. But I think this piece is terrific.
First of all, and I think Adam, you and I believe this perhaps to a shared fault, where I do worry that I focus too much on how companies fail. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Where it can inhibit your own action. Like you need to be, there's a degree to which you have to be blind to the odds. Yeah. Certainly in a startup. Totally.
And you, it's like this walk in this fine line between, I need to know how things fail. But if I look, if I learn too much, it might inhibit what I actually need to go do to make this thing successful. But we definitely, you and I both like to understand like, how did things come unglued? And I feel like I learn a lot more from failure than from success. Totally.
Success is just, I would say success teaches us all nothing, but success certainly teaches me nothing. That's maybe a much more, that's a more, a more concise statement.
Well, it's so hard to know that you're drawing the right lessons from success or like that. Oh, for sure. Like that, you know, um, A couple of companies ago, Delphix, we talked to lots of folks from VMware. We were doing something virtualization-related and VMware was doing something virtualization-related.
There were lots of folks who were early but not super early at VMware who drew all kinds of weird result inferences from their success.
Totally. And also, you don't want, as someone was saying in the chat, a lot of success is luck. And you, it's hard for people to say like, I was really goddamn lucky. Totally. I was in, God, I was in the right place at the right time with the right idea, the right team, like all that just like happened to come together. And which is almost always the case.
Like there's always this kind of element that is out of your control. I feel. Yeah. And, but I think that part of the reason that the O'Reilly piece is good is it's like not a reflection of, on unequivocal success. It's a, and obviously titled how I failed, but it's getting into some of the specific things that Tim felt that he did wrong.
And I know that like, I think this is another thing that's really important that even I think Tim is remarkably candid here. I think he's, he's a terrific writer. He's also like telling a narrative that is kind of his narrative and someone, I mean, someone else at O'Reilly, uh, could very easily be like, that is not like consistent with my understanding.
It's so easy for different people to have different understandings and for a founder to even not, you know, they'll see some things and not see other things. Um, Because I think it's always important to consider that you're getting kind of one narrative and that there are other narratives.
Yeah. There's a great line in that piece from Tim where he was talking about an interview with Michael Lewis where Michael Lewis said, you don't know the book you've written until people tell you what they've read or something along those lines. Does this have a Sam Bankman Freed kind of moral to it?
Michael Lewis, let's reflect back. So what book was that? What was the... Well, let's go tell him. The hagiography you wrote, hagiography or hagiography? I started knowing that one. I think it's hagiography. I think that's right. All right. The hagiography that you accidentally wrote on Sam Bankman Freed, which I guess readers are telling you that's the book you wrote in that case. Yeah.
But yeah, that's interesting. I think that's right, that you don't necessarily know
Yeah. Even the culture you're creating, like even the culture that we're creating here. Oh, for sure. Go figure out how new employees experience it to understand what it actually looks like.
Yes.
Because even that has changed and you lose track of it over the years and how it's practiced.
Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think it's very easy. So I think you've got to kind of keep that in mind when you're looking at Tim's piece. But all that said, I really like this. I thought there was a lot of specificity in here that was...
really important yeah um and some of that is just like let me do like failure number one of people only hear half the story which i think it was kind of interesting right where he's trying to give tough messages with empathy and people like well i'm gonna like i'll take the empathy and i'll kind of like discard the tough message but that's like his perspective like maybe someone else like the specifics on that one also tickled me where i think it was that he was um
you've got to fill the car with gas, but a road trip is not a tour of gas stations, which I really like, by the way, it's delightful. And he was like, but people only heard a road trip is not a tour of gas stations. That's right.
It's like, this is great. So we don't need to stop. We're not stopping for gas at all. No, no, no, no, no.
That's not what I said. Listen to the whole thing.
You're doing that thing. You do again. You're only going to say the half the story. Yeah. So I thought that was, uh, was really interesting. I, the one I, but I got to say, and this is where, uh,
the thing that was very influential for me, and this is like, I do think the positive of the founder mode piece is his, the second failure of that's not how it's, that's how it's done, where he brings in a bunch of HR professionals that, and the thing that was interesting, and you might find this actually really hard to believe given the kind of the way the piece is written.
When I read that, I, I didn't think that was the failure. And I was kind of at a moment where I was beginning to question some of my more idiosyncratic methods, which you might already be like, first of all, just don't believe that. That doesn't sound credible at all. But I really was. I was just like, God, maybe... Because I'm doing things that are really differently than other people.
You're like, maybe we should be bringing in HR professionals like Tim says? I definitely was wondering on things like performance review, where it's like, I don't know, maybe. And... the, and then he kind of like hit. And so he says, I, you know, I complained, but I eventually gave in. Yeah. I literally, what you, I mean, hand on heart, I am speaking my own truth, whether you believe it or not.
Maybe I don't even believe it. I'm saying, but when I read that in 2013 or whatever, I'm like, maybe I should give in. And then the next sentence is like, no, no, you idiot. It was a disaster. And I thought it was like, and I think the danger, I think I liked about this is it is very specific. Yeah.
with respect to some specific policies that were on regular reviews and so on that were very, very specific, and any kind of regrets not having preserved the culture longer, that does not mean you discard all expertise, I think. And I think that's where you get into the false dichotomy that gets dangerous. Yeah, totally.
And knowing when, I think one of the dangers of just following expertise is that you're cargo culting without understanding the rationale. You are doing the things that you're being told to do without understanding whether they apply to your business, how they should apply.
And then I've also seen this in folks doing things at one company, coming to a new company, trying to do it the same way, and not understanding the differences that made them successful that then make them unsuccessful in the new company.
Totally. Where you have something that worked well and now is not working at all. And not understanding why this thing worked so well. And it's like, well, maybe that was incidental success. Maybe that thing wasn't working. Or, I think probably more likely, it was implicitly dependent on a bunch of factors that you didn't necessarily see. Totally. That you didn't, yeah. I think it's...
It's tough and it's complicated. But so that was, that was the bit in that piece that was very influential for me and gave me some of the guts actually to be like, okay, I'm actually going to, it's okay to actually go my own way on this stuff. Yeah.
But I think you need to be really, I do think you need to be deliberate because I think that the, again, the danger of Graham's piece is that like, oh no, you just go founder mode, which to me, doesn't that, what do you think of when you think, oh, here founder mode?
I think something out of Silicon Valley.
It does sound like an episode of Silicon Valley is out of HBO Silicon Valley. I don't think you like Beast Mode and Marshawn Lynch. Am I the only one that has a strong Beast Mode? And I think that Paul Graham would dismiss that as a sports ball, so I don't think he would know who Marshawn Lynch is or what Beast Mode is. But that...
you kind of have this idea of like founder mode is just not going to accept any sort of negotiation or that's right. Absolutist. Absolutist. Founder mode demands results and demands them now. And I mean, that is, So that's kind of what prompted me to be like, all right, can we undo some of the false dichotomy here? Yeah.
And which I feel Tim's piece does, but I wanted to, I mean, part of what motivated me to write that, write the oxide piece is,
is I wanted to also I wanted did you click on my link for dramaturgical dyad of course thank you I want to see which specific thank you Simpsons reference like what what what frame of thank you thank you I felt underappreciated on dramaturgical dyad where did you expect to get that appreciation I think right here right now so I think I got it I think I got it actually yeah because you were traveling you were out so it's like why yeah no I just got it actually I don't think anyone um
Yeah, I was, I mean, it is a narrow joke. I mean, I just, I didn't know.
No, I appreciate that. I felt like it was an audience of like five. And I don't know who the other four people are. Actually, no, it's you and Dave. That's right. Dave. I mean, if I can think of who would get it, I'm not sure they're going to read the article. You know, they're not going to read the article. Do you know who would get that? It's actually my kids.
Not Tobin, but my 17-year-old and my 12-year-old are scholars of the early. Yeah. And you're like, hey, kids, new blog post from dad. I knew blog posts from dad. I, you know, I didn't do that. I, but you know, I haven't done everything wrong. This is one of those moments when they, uh, when I did read it, they would get it. They did read it. Yeah. Well, this is where I've done other things wrong.
They're not going to read the blog entry, but I do think that the, that Steve jobs and like Steve jobs and John Scully, uh, is the dramaturgical diet of Silicon Valley.
Yes.
Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, this is like the Tom and Jerry. This is, and I feel like that is really reductive. Totally.
Especially because as we, as we've talked about years ago on the show, like Steve jobs, I think is not fully understood or appreciated in, in terms of like how he operated when, when he succeeded and when he failed.
Absolutely. And I mean, again, the question that I am dying to ask the dead Steve jobs is what was the influence of next? Yeah. on your return to Apple. Absolutely. Because I feel like Steve Jobs, the next big thing was such an, I mean, such an outstanding spotlight on this long period of history, 11 years. And, you know, I know we've talked about it before. I think it's an amazing book.
I love the fact that that book is written when he's left for dead.
Hmm.
because it just like, there's no reason to like praise this guy. Right. And I don't, I don't think it's like overly condemning, but it's just like, yeah, I'm definitely not like letting him review it or what. I don't, I don't care what he thinks about it. Like part of like, this guy is down and out and I'm like, I'm, I'm here to, to tell the, the story of,
a fall right it is not a fallen resurrection story it is a false story and and i think that like the the problem with i mean i was shocked that the isaacson because i you know we talked about this on our yeah i think our first podcast right or one of the early ones went back to the isaacson's biography and it's like next is like six pages really and like man i think it's so much more important than that yeah because this guy did not succeed at next
And how much did that, and like Scully wasn't totally wrong on a lot of things. Yeah. And Jobs definitely wasn't right in that, in that kind of, that 1985 dramaturgical dyad. Just wedging it in there one more time. Good. For all it's worth. So I felt that we kind of need to break that one apart. And I do feel that, I mean, again, I've said it before, but boy, mandatory reading on jobs.
You just can't stop with the Isaacson bio. You really have to dig deeper on that guy.
In terms of what you were saying about experience, I just feel like these reductive views of Scully versus jobs or founder mode versus management mode, Like you want founders who are thoughtful and it's sort of like also good at ignoring things. I mean, I think one of the, one of the spoke, I think briefly to this kind of notion of paralysis.
If you're like, I want to get all of these things right. It's impossible. Yes. So you need to take shorthands for some of them. Some of the shorthands are, I'm going to do it my way arbitrarily. I'm going to do it the way that it's always been done arbitrarily.
Not that either of those is correct, but then focusing on the ones that are key to your business and they're taking a blend of like what you think is right for your business, but then learning from experience.
Totally. And actually, this is where I got to say, Paul Graham and Steve Jobs, I mean, I'm glad we're talking about them in kind of a single episode because they are, to me, they are both, they're complicated for me. Cause Paul Graham is actually complicated for me. Paul Graham is not, I mean, Elon Musk is not complicated. Sam Altman is not complicated for me.
Paul Graham is complicated for me because he's not always, he's definitely not always wrong. He's got some, he's got some really important insights. And actually I like one of his, the important insights that again was very personally influential for me and for us at Oxide is, uh, do things that don't scale.
Hmm.
do things that don't scale is a very good way to say like, this is working for us now. You and I are having a disagreement about whether this can work for us in the indefinite future. We don't actually have to have that argument right now.
Absolutely. And I think, yeah, I mean the other side of it of like, this won't scale when we're 10 people, a hundred people, a thousand people. They have been in those arguments. I remember one in particular, um, where there was a cranky customer. They weren't getting the performance they wanted out of a thing we had sold them.
I'm like, well, what if we just give them enough of the thing that we sold them to meet their performance needs? Not at Oxide, by the way. Cherish customers of Oxide. To be clear. And... Also, it was a software product, so giving them twice as much was sort of fine or whatever. And someone started freaking out about revenue recognition when we're a public company.
This is a company, by the way, that never went public. This is a company that got acquired 10 years after this conversation by private equity. But being able to say, yes, this doesn't scale. Yes, when we are being held to certain standards... You know, by our public investors, we can't do this. Also, it's today. And like, let's just get through the day. Right.
What I think, and this is where it is really important to figure out, like, what are... what are the kind of the hard rules of the road? Yeah.
And, and I feel like, you know, we have spelled that out very explicitly at Oxide in part because of our experience having not where that's not clearly spelled out and where, where founder mode moves into things that are like pretty shady, you know, where, cause you get things like, look, I understand what you're saying about complying with the law, but we'll, and we'll do that.
Like when we, it's like, I don't think Paul Graham said do things that are sometimes illegal. I think there was something that's legal.
um but i have seen that you know i've you get some really kind of gross stuff so like where is that line too right you want to have like queer lines there but still allow for a company that is young to do something that it wouldn't do in the indefinite future yeah absolutely and to be clear like when i was talking about recognizing revenue i'm not talking about like cooking the books but there's a difference between like cooking the books and uh like how you're backdating revenue in a
This was all totally above board.
People were just concerned about what the future would look like. What the future would look like, right. And also what kind of precedent or setting and so on. It doesn't actually matter. Totally. Let's make them happy. And how can we make these customers happy?
So another thing you had mentioned is kind of this funky dichotomy is that you, as a startup, you're being encouraged to do things that are iconoclastic.
Yeah.
And then immediately defer to... LinkedIn wisdom. Wisdom from the resume.
I remember at Delphix, I joined this company. It was like 20 people at the time. It was the first startup I'd been at. And what I found really interesting startling was the degree to which when we were hiring people, we wanted to see people who had done that exact thing like two or three times. And I sort of thought, oh, we're going to be this scrappy startup.
We're going to take chances on people. We're going to... But it was clearly not part of the risk budget to find people who were just hungry and we thought could do the thing. And I think there was some, maybe it was just where the risk budget was, and there was some strength to that thought. There are also a bunch of downsides to it.
We found people who had done it before and maybe weren't hungry to do it again or had forgotten the drive that it took to do that again.
Right. Forgotten the drive. They don't want to do it again. Kind of bored by it. Also, I didn't do that. I was at that company when it was done. And yes, I was the EVP of sales. But actually, I didn't actually grow revenue myself. I was merely in the building when that happened.
And by the way, we've talked about this in the past, but definitely one of the things that we lived, and I think a lot of startups live, is... where you take on this expertise from your go-to-market function in particular, and you take on an EVP of sales coming from an established company, and then they need their whole organization to come with them in order to be successful.
And all of that just adds to the burn. And then you, as a founder, realize too late, like, wait a minute, I've made a huge, huge, huge mistake here.
Yeah, I mean, it's a very expensive mistake. And it's a big bet. Maybe it's the right bet. But if... that person and that team and that other company match things up really well. But if it doesn't match up, if it's, if it's sort of surface level similarities, then you've just onboarded a big team and you know, it's, it's going to take a lot of money to then undo that.
Yeah. And I got to say, when people talk about in particular, the things that they've done so that, you know, I, it's on my resume. I was at this company for those years and, And I can kind of make arbitrary claims that aren't really fact-checked. Yeah. And there is, I think, a gross inclination.
And I think this is where – the reason this is a problem is because this leads to the mistakes that Graham is identifying as people that are – not flim-flam men. What does he call them? Those that are misleading liars, effectively. He has a name for it somewhere. Yeah.
um they're founders being gaslit but he has there's a specific return of phrase he has about people that are are misleading um and the and the problem is that people exaggerate what they've done um and they you don't in fact we had someone i mean recently who is like, Oh, like, let me advise you because I built this company.
I, I built this company to from a hundred million dollars in revenue to a billion dollars in revenue, making up numbers. And it's like, Oh, wow, that's wild. And then you look at like when they were there and it's like, and actually notice that they, they, they had claimed that they had built it from earlier than that. So kind of its first kind of $250 million revenue.
It's like, by the time you joined the company, it was a public company.
Hmm.
And the revenues were much higher than – are you lying to yourself right now? And I think this happens a lot where people have kind of told themselves their own history, and it's kind of impossible to fact check. And so you take on this expertise as a founder, and then you discover that it's not happening for you, and you wonder –
And this is where, you know, when Graham talks to talking to founders who had felt gaslit, I think this is where that's coming from, where they brought in that expertise. They're not seeing the results. And then they're being told, no, no, you're not seeing the results because you don't understand the problem.
I do think there can be, for founders in particular, there's going to be pressure from the board. The pressure from the board is hire someone who is an expert in this domain to de-risk the company, this thing that I've put a bunch of money into. Part of that is the whole hire and retain search firm. They go and find the people and plugging someone in.
So then after you as a company have spent money on the search and money on an expensive person, then you feel really misled Yes. You told me to just like hold my nose and hire this person who, and with faith in their expertise, and then it didn't pan out.
That's right. And this is where, okay, I found the turn of phrase in Graham's piece. 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. So that's the professional fakers. This is turn of phrase there. And again,
The thing that I think Graham does a disservice to is he blames the fakers. Yeah. Fine. He does not blame the founders. He does not blame the investors that force that upon their founders. Totally.
To some degree, I feel like the fakers may be the least culpable. Absolutely. Because I don't think fakers, I mean, maybe this is naive, but I think most people are basically honest or try to be. and good people. I think there are very few people who try to represent themselves as one thing to get into a startup, get underpaid, and get some stock compensation, and then try to take the company.
None of that makes sense. I think by and large, although I can think of some examples.
Right. Now, I'm trying to get all of the many, many examples I'm thinking of. Yeah, fine. Let's go with what you're saying. Absolutely. Absolutely.
I remember in particular, there was one example who was telling me they could sell all this stuff at a previous company and they were going to be amazing. I saw that they had worked with you, and I asked. I was like, clearly this person doesn't tell 100% truth, but I'm not sure it's 100% false either. Oh, yes. And I think you told me it was closer to 99.8% false, but you're right.
It was like 0.2% true. It is 0.2% true. But this is like a relatively rare example of someone who's actually like... A flim-flam man. I think mostly people show up thinking that they did the thing, that they can do it again, that it's a good fit.
Because the success taught them nothing. Yeah, I think that's right. Because they were there. They were there when the success happened. Why would it not be due to their hard work? It's like, well, it's more complicated than that. Yeah. And then you end up with, I mean, that's what Graham calls the most skillful liars in the world. And again, I think you're right.
That is like a little bit, on the one hand, that is too condemning of them because it's not necessarily dishonesty. On the other hand, it's maybe a little bit too generous because a lot of these people are lying to themselves. They just don't realize it.
Absolutely. It is falsehoods that they are promoting. Maybe liars is fine. To some degree, everyone believes their own story. It's up to you, the founders, the board, the folks interviewing these folks to figure out what's true and what's not. That's right. That's true of every hire to some degree. Everyone comes in with some degree of divergence from reality. For a lot of people, it's small.
For some people, it's bigger, whatever. But especially for a high leverage, for a key role in the company, when you're hiring VP of whatever, you've got to be careful.
Just faith and experience is not enough. Faith and experience is not enough. And I do think... I mean, I've said this many times before. I'll say it many times again. Team formation is the most expensive, most important thing you, one does at a company and you need to spend a lot of time on it. I think too many people are like, well, the recruiter handed me these four names.
So that's, those are the names. Yeah. It's like, what's your rubric for, you know, you are hiring someone in a domain in which you currently have no one. What's your rubric? And one of the things that I've always found, and again, this is the specificity that Graham's piece is totally missing, of how do you add? There are people who are superlative people who can help you out as a founder.
You don't need to go to founder mode for everything. You actually do need people who can add a lot to you. How do you find those people? What chances do you take? Because I think you're right that it's surprising how conservative startups get. Yeah. Because they don't know the role. Actually, I don't know what go-to-market is. I don't know what marketing is. I've never worked in support.
I don't know these things. So I actually don't know how to evaluate someone. And it's like, that's where you've got to... I think it's incumbent on you as a founder. Yeah, you've got to ramp up. You've got to figure out a way to go... solve that problem.
Yeah, I mean, that's what you'd hope that you can get from your board. And sometimes you can, sometimes you can't, but whether it's directly or plugging you into other founders or other leaders to help educate yourself.
And this is something, again, I'm not sure people see it, and it sounds like it's true of the Plaid founders as well, but this is what the Carlson brothers did well. I want to actually, I'm curious to understand, and at one point Patrick reached out to me, he was like, what should I be looking for in a VP of engineering? I'm not trying to hire you.
I'm trying to come over and have free food, which of course, as you know, pretty much. It's okay. It's time for you to leave, actually. I think that people don't do this nearly often enough is to ask for perspective from other people. Who should I talk to? Who's the best person in this role that you know? I'm not trying to hire them. I just want to know what I should be looking for.
And I think, and we still do that. I mean, I think it's, it is, you know, we've always done that and still do as we extend into kind of new roles. And it is really, really, really important. I'm not sure we, we, I don't think we've talked about it. I don't think we talk about it broadly as an industry and we should like you like look to other people, senior people to get their perspective.
This again, the bit that Graham is just like totally missing.
is actually, how do you get that wisdom as opposed to just discarding it? And not get it as the answer. What they say is not the answer, but it's part of what goes into the calculation.
That's a very good point. Because I do think one of the challenges is, of the idiosyncratic, iconoclastic things you're doing, how much of that is really important versus not? I'll give you a very concrete example. We had an early investor in the company who in an early conversation, an early board meeting, I might've brought up the podcast. Mentioned the podcast. Okay. And this is on the metal.
Okay. The board member made clear in no uncertain terms that I was never to speak of the podcast again. That is, and I was just like embarrassed for bringing it up. Like, okay, I'm not going to bring up the podcast. And I'm like, what do we do? Like, do we, should we not do the podcast?
Like, I'm kind of like, it feels like the podcast feels like it's pretty cheap and it feels like it's pretty valuable. Yeah. Do I, and I was, I didn't really know it. And then another board member came up to me, took me aside and be like, Hey, I love the podcast podcast. Podcast is great.
I like, I don't bring it, don't bring it up around him, but just, and the, like, I think that like you will get conflicting point is like, you will get conflicting advice. I don't think he was necessarily wrong. Like I understood the perspective that he had and like, we do not talk about the podcast at a, at a board level, but, But the podcast is the right thing for us to go do.
And I think there's a lot of things like that where, in other words, like that in terms of like, I'm getting conflicting advice. Someone's telling me like, absolutely, do not do it. You're out of your mind. And someone's like, that's a great idea. And you have to pick and choose. And you have to know, you have to kind of... know your own self and have your own sense of judgment.
But you need to seek out that wisdom, though. Ask the question. I'd rather know the perspective. For sure. And I think that too often we just kind of ignore the perspectives.
Especially, as you say, when you're hiring into domains that were previously not needed at the company. When you're hiring your first person in support, when you're hiring your first program manager, your first product manager, whatever.
So I think we talk, I can't remember if we talked about this on the hiring podcast or not, but you know, one thing that we do is when we're hiring a new role, we go to the person that we know just in our kind of extended world is like, this is the person who I can't hire.
But I really look up to in this role and I want them to look at the materials that we're going to, that I want them to look at the portfolio. And we, a bunch of times we've gotten, I mean, just extremely good suggestions about things to add to the portfolio of work. It's been really, really valuable. Yeah, totally. Because that's informed the rubric. Yeah.
Um, also more than once, one of those people have been like, actually, I might be working for you jerks. I don't know you turkeys. Right. Um, so that, that can happen too. Um, but I think that that is definitely important to seek that out. And again, this is what kind of Graham doesn't get to the other thing that, okay.
Like, as long as we're, can I talk about some other things that just drove me nuts? I mean, or do you want to know the idea of like the idea that he has created some new element in the lab, um, The idea that he has discovered some heretofore unknown super alloy that it will be incumbent upon future generations to study in detail. Books on founder mode, we don't know what it is.
Books have never been written on founder mode. It's like, what are you talking about? No one's written history. No one knows what leadership is. I mean, Paul Graham, surely you read more than this, right?
I hope. No. The sort of mystical reverence that he speaks for.
Exactly. In the future, we will understand founder mode. But now it is a complete mystery. It's a complete mystery to you, pal. The rest of us are out here running companies. I've got some thoughts on this one. It's not dark energy, right? It's really not. It is really not. So I think that was also a little bit ridiculous. But I actually also feel that there wasn't... So I felt that was annoying.
But I felt there was little in this that was completely wrong. Yeah. Other than the false dichotomy that it leaves you with. I don't know. I mean, I feel like the false dichotomy is fairly central. Yeah, I'm already realizing I am over my skis and I'm defending this piece way too much.
But I think... You know what? I'm glad that we... we had this cooling off period to not just go into the hot take of, of, you know, founder versus management mode. But I think like there, there is, there's like a kernel of wisdom and certainly the kernel of a discussion here about like, when do you value experience and why not?
and I think actually for that, I do think that, so he references Brian Chesky's talk. Yeah. That was given at Y Combinator, so that one we didn't see. But Chesky interviewed a couple of other places talking about his experience at Airbnb, and I felt it was much more interesting. Did you listen to that?
Yeah, you sent me a link to that YouTube video. We'll keep that in the show notes. And I watched the first 45 minutes or something of it. I thought it was great. I thought that what I heard from him was... he deferred too much to folks. He absorbed, in particular, the wisdom of hire great people and set them loose and let them do their job and don't mess with them.
And then found that a lot of the things that he cared about about the business, about the health of the business, were not going well. And then he drew this distinction between
micromanagement and getting involved in the details yeah in particular you know he kind of made some very significant changes to the way they did product management he got really in the details understanding how these different functions operate um i would be interested to know if if the facts on the ground draw this distinction between micromanagement and being in the details Right.
Oh, he said he wasn't a micromanager. No, he was just in the details.
He said he was just holding your fingers as you type.
That's right. It's not micromanaging you. You can move that finger, I think. Okay, not a bad example. I can't move that finger. I mean, as long as you don't go the wrong way.
I mean, who knows how it plays on the ground. But I thought... Certainly, as a founder, as a leader, there's this fear of losing control. This fear of when I hire someone and I want them to feel responsible. I want them to be able to operate with autonomy. I have trust. I want to build that trust and I want to hand over that trust and operate with trust.
And that can be scary where you say, and then tell me in three months or six months or 18 months how it went.
When I think one of the things he says in that, that I actually like, cause I'm like, what would I do to Paul Graham's piece to make it less divisive, less of a false dichotomy? One of the things that he says, there's like people want clarity. Yeah. And often that is what they, I mean, that to me is what splits the difference is like, you've got terrific people that you've hired.
You want to empower. They do need clarity. Yeah. And I think that part of what he describes Airbnb operating at cross purposes, because he had stepped back from offering that clarity. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. And I think it is really important. Because I think that also if you've got an organization in which you foster trust, that clarity is super helpful, I think, to people. Yeah.
Where it's like, oh, okay, this sale to this customer is really important for our quarter. Or this feature is being weighted. Oh, I get it. Okay, that's why this is important. And that clarity can allow everybody to go to their own autonomy, find the right way to solve the problem.
I'm not telling people how to solve a problem necessarily, but giving them the clarity about what's important, I think is... Because if you call this piece clarity mode, it would just feel like, that feels good. I don't know. Clarity mode sounds good.
That's a great point because I think there is a... People like to provide autonomy, or at least it sounds nice, right? I trust the person, I'm going to provide autonomy. But if you don't show them what true north is, Yes. Then everyone will try to figure it out and they'll figure it out a little bit differently and you're not going to be happy with the results.
That's right. And you kind of have to like show them what, that's exactly right. And I do think that like autonomy is, I mean, maybe this is where you get to like my own individual style or our style at Oxide. Autonomy is great. It's just in terms of like if people have that clarity, because I think like how many times
At Oxide, have we seen something unanticipated that is delightful that happens, that you absolutely want to happen? It's like, I don't think anyone would have known to ask for this. But because... I mean, what I love... Maybe I'm just... easily entertained. But when Augustus did this integration between Salesforce and the ability to provision a silo on the colo rack for a prospective customer,
So you made it really easy for Travis to go from a prospective customer to like spinning up their own silo. So our sales folks can like get off the call with the customer and create their own demo environment. Right. And then using Dropshot and using all the things that we had built to go do this. I just like, that was great. Totally.
And I just felt like that is where people were like, no, no, I can see that this needs to be done. And I'm just like, I'm empowered to go do it, so I'm just going to go do it.
It was great. I think that's great. I think when there's autonomy without as strong a sense of true north, you can get people unclear about prioritization. With so many things, especially at a startup, When it's like, actually for any given task, there's no owner. It's not that everyone's standing shoulder to shoulder and everyone has their lane. For any given task, there might be no owner.
So knowing which of the 25 things I could do, should I prioritize? And how does that tie to what the objectives are? And when objectives are changing, as they will, how do I know it's fine that I'm still doing this other thing?
Right, and I do think it's really important that leadership founders offer that clarity on priorities and then are going to have to deal with some tough questions. I'm like, okay, these two can't both be the top priority because, I'm sorry, I'm asking, we actually are going to have to... and find a way to stack these. One of these has to be more important than the other.
Sorry, which I think is, but if you don't, and this is, I think where, when you have these startups, like I need to go into founder mode because I feel like the right thing isn't happening. it's just easy to turn into a wrecking ball. And you turn into, actually, we have some colleagues from a company that were describing the management style.
And I'm like, wow, that is one of the worst cases of seagull management I've ever heard. And she was like, seagull management? I'm like, I don't think I made that up. Have you heard the term seagull management? I think I have, but I'm not sure that I'd be able to define it. This is like a seagull, like a seagull. It swoops in, shits all over everything, and takes off. It steals your french fry.
100%.
It steals your french fry. You've met my sister. Her hair looks like nesting material to birds. It's weird to the point where we just need to acknowledge it. She needs to wear a hat. Some sort of protective headdress because there's something about... I don't know what it is. Obviously, she's my younger sister, so I kind of thought she was exaggerating. But over the years, I've come to accept no...
This is happening to you more than it's happening to other people. Birds are swooping onto your hair and attempting to attack your skull in a way that doesn't... No, this is not routine. You're right. Does she listen to the podcast? I want to find out and I don't want to ask her. She's so busy. I just don't want to ask her. So I figured this is really the best way to find out.
It was really just to denigrate her on here and see if she listens to it or not. But no, it's no denigration at all. Quite the contrary. She has got... She's got a condition that needs to be... I honor her condition, her challenges in life. Other people don't have this challenge. And we were at Fisherman's Wharf. I guess she's kind of like, this happens to me more frequently than other people.
I'm kind of dismissive. And we go to Fisherman's Wharf. This is years ago. And... the seagull that descended upon her was the size of a Cessna. That was like, that was like a plane crash. I think it was gigantic. And like, tried to like, just like she, he thought that she was the French fry. Just like tried. It was, it was really quite dramatic. I don't know if the seagull was a show or not.
Definitely made her point like very, very dramatically. Yeah. So anyway, I was showing this idea of seagull management, and I think it was life-changing. It's like, I need to send this Wikipedia article to many of my former colleagues, because this is exactly... And it was an environment where senior leadership, very technical...
and would descend in on... People would be working on a problem for two or three weeks and would descend in and disrupt everything and take off. Great. Exactly. And that is the worst. I really think that is... It's really, I'd rather be in like command and control than that. You know what I mean?
It's where this kind of like false sense of autonomy where you let me, you let us together as a team develop a solution for this. And now you've descended in and like ripped it up. And now it's like, boy, that's that corrosive.
Yeah. You know, this is actually almost exactly the pathology at my wife's last job for her that caused her to leave. And part of what led to it.
She listened to the podcast. I guess we're going to fight. Oh, 100%. Maybe 99.8% now. We'll see. Even the baseball one.
But that came about in her organization because of growth. Growth where leaders previously did have the bandwidth to have the level of involvement that they wanted to be able to be comfortable with all these programs. And then as the organization grew, they didn't have the time to do it. They didn't have the bandwidth to do it. There was too much stuff going on.
And they had not taken the lesson that they needed to like changed the way that they interacted with some of these priorities.
This is a good segue to Camille's piece. Camille Fournier wrote a piece that was pretty interesting in reaction to this. Founders create managers. And I'll drop a link into that in the chat. Which I think is kind of what you're saying. Is that founders created the chaos that created the situation. Founders are creating the situation effectively. And
which I think in terms of like, they are, you want to be a details person. Right. And you don't know the right way to let go of those details. Yeah. And, and this is where, you know, so you, cause I was in part of what kind of prompted the, the longer blog entry too, is I was noodling on like, how do you do this? How does one do this? How do we do this? And when you said this, what do you mean?
I mean, I, How do you keep kind of a true north to an organization as it gets larger? How do you avoid the pathologies that Camille describes? How do you avoid the seagull management? How do you keep, while at the same time, Providing clarity, and I think it is very important to stay detail-oriented. I think that is extremely important, and I think that leadership, stay detail-oriented.
I think it's a real problem when, and you and I have both seen this, where leadership gets divorced from the details, and all of a sudden, you've got a great blog entry from years ago, I am not a resource anymore.
And to me, that is indicative of this problem where it's like, these have now become opaque blocks that I can kind of move around and I've lost track of like why things are hard, why they take long. And it's now schedule over everything. I've now over-promised to a customer because I've lost track of the details that make this difficult. And now when my team doesn't deliver, I blame the team.
It's just like, you're in this loop that I think is a loop that is really, really corrosive. Yeah. And so how do you avoid this? How do you not get into that pathology? How do you stay detail-oriented without being a micromanager? How do you have autonomy while still having clarity?
a buddy of mine said of like, as he was assigning the ranks at a bigger company, he said, you know, the more you get promoted, like the roads tend toward CFO, like all roles, which I thought was a great insight. Cause his point was, you know, you, you start losing the ability to, to be involved with projects at a level of detail that matters.
And all you really get to do is pull the levers of who gets money, who gets staffing. Those are the kinds of things that you have control over.
And what Jeske points out, I think rightfully, is that in the absence of other things, especially where influence is being used, and especially in an organization where people do value autonomy, things can get political. And they talk about shadow hierarchy and things like that, where And so the thing that I, as I was kind of like reflecting on this, I'm like, you know, how do we do this?
And I do think like, man, the written word is real. I mean, dovetails for our episode from last time on our piece, but the written word is really, really important in terms of broadcast. I mean, I, I mean, God, I am so thankful and I should like, there's a bell I should ring every time this happens where,
maybe a prospective investor or a customer, someone asks something about an issue that I'm not up to speed on. And, oh, thank God there's an RFD on it. And I spend 20 minutes reading the RFD. It's like, damn, okay, this is great. I didn't have to waste anyone's time. You don't have to create a fire drill where you say, hey, everybody, I know exactly what our thinking is on this.
I know exactly what we've thought about. It's like, boy, am I really, really, really grateful for it. And I think that Amazon famously does this too. I've never worked at AWS or Amazon, but famously has a writing intensive culture where you're kind of sitting down and reading for the first half of the meeting. Yeah. I kind of love that.
I mean, first, my understanding is that people write a memo of five pages or something. I think that's of a fairly prescribed length. And then people sit down in the meeting, they read it. I guess they raise their pencils when they're done or whatever and discuss it. Slowly, the hands go up. God, I'm the slowest reader in here. It's like, oh, boy. You come 15 minutes early. That's right.
But I think it's great. I mean, I think it also... Well, they famously write the press release too. Oh, yeah.
This is back when they were being innovative, by the way. I don't want to... Sorry to... Yeah. As one of our colleagues who was formerly of AWS, I'm like, pretty sure the last innovative thing they did was Lambda. That was in like 2015. But I think that certainly when the Bezos-led company, they would write the press release before working.
And I think that's an interesting way to get ground truth and clarity. It's a press release, but in terms of getting that true north and getting that on paper. Yeah, okay.
I'm going to go do a deep cut here. Another place where we read about this was one of our favorite books. by Dave hits. Oh, out of cast rateable. He talked about, does he writing the future history, the future history. Now, dear listener, do not purchase this book.
It is too late. How do you, how do you possibly, this is like, don't look up, but how do you tell me? People don't even know who Dave hits is founder of NetApp.
Anyway, terrible, terrible autobiography. I feel comfortable saying this now. Uh, but do we, do we feel totally comfortable? Not fully comfortable.
I think we should feel fully comfortable. Oh, All right. I think we should feel fully comfortable. All right. I think we should feel fully comfortable. I think this is a, this is a, this is a great story. You know who I, my sister does not listen to the podcast. I don't think she might. Your wife, you say a hundred percent. I think it's unlikely she goes to the podcast. Dave hits zero percent.
Let's not listen to the podcast. Okay. Says I. Let's go. Okay. So Dave Hitz writes this book, How to Castrate a Bull. That's right. We were at Fishworks at the time. We were at Fishworks. We were at a NetApp competitor.
That's right. We were trying to build a product to compete directly with NetApp. Yes.
And what we had heard from customers is like, I love the product. I hate the price. And I'm kind of not in love with the company. The company is very self-important. But I do love the product. And someone in the chat says, I have a signed copy of Dave Hitz's book. And you, you are not the only one with a signed copy. You are not alone.
I also have a signed copy. So what is the genesis of this? So first of all, we wanted this book. We, the team at Fishworks. Now, Oxide is thrifty. Fishworks was cheap. Yeah. And so we were going to pay like the $18 or whatever those books.
And you're sure this is just on the point of principle of not wanting to line his pockets by... I mean, it's like... I mean, we've said that an undercurrent of this episode is Success Teaches You Nothing. The subtitle of this book is How Success Taught Me Nothing by Dave Hitt.
That's pretty much right. So I contacted the publisher. I used true but misleading statements about how I might want to teach a class. Are you reading from a prepared statement right now? Yeah, I need my lawyer. That's right. I'm not going to go pro se on this one. So we got a copy. And then actually, I don't know if you know this, but... like the FedEx got delayed or something.
And I sent like a nasty gram to the publisher. And so they sent us two copies.
So we have two copies. I did not realize that. It's like, wow, this person is very hot. No, you're saying you're true, but misleading things. Did they involve the fact that you'd be, that you needed a review copy?
Um, I think by this time it was out, but I, I, I just, I, I think I, I needed a copy. You needed a copy, obviously, and you're not going to pay for it. Okay. Not going to pay for it. Right. So, uh, so I read it, I started reading it and it was terrible.
Maybe reading it out loud, reading passages out loud.
Right. We would bring it in. So what we started writing a fan blog, I started writing when, where's the germ of this idea? It's such a good idea. I think, first of all, it was like a distraction from our ping pong variant. So we needed something else to do with that other than working on the product. So I think we felt like this personality was someone who was so susceptible to praise.
That's kind of my recollection, too, is that I feel that this is a consequence of us reading the big con. Yeah. Sure, I read it. The Big Con, terrific book. The Sting is based on the Big Con. A book written in the 30s about the Argo of the grift. All right. Oh, such a good book. And the Big Con, one of the things it repeats over again is you can only con a greedy man.
Hmm.
And I think I do recall us thinking like there is a kind of an ego con here that if you praise someone who is already praising themselves, you're not going to get fact checked.
You can only ego con a vain person.
You can only ego con a vain person.
Yes. So, so I, as, as my persona, uh,
Dave Lightman. Dave Lightman. I, we will leave it to others to figure out the, the Dave Lightman. I mean, I feel like that's a good homework assignment. If you don't recognize the name, Dave Lightman, not in the notes, not in the notes. That's right.
No, that's a little, that's a homework assignment. That's a good one. So Dave Lightman wrote a chapter by chapter review, like overly praising concern of embodying like much too much of, do you have the link? Yeah.
I will find the link. Can you find the link now? I can talk about something else while you find the link. Because I just feel that we need to... First of all, it should be said that you wrote the fan blog. So one of the things we figured out... I don't know if we knew he was going to pay attention to it or not. It became clear that he was hanging on every word. Every word.
Like he was commenting on the fan blog. So at that point, it's like, oh my god. We got them. Oh, God bless you. God bless you, Blogspot. Sign of the times that it's on Blogspot.
Okay, so at what point do the lawyers... Oh, that's right. So I took the design of the blog from the NetApp blog. Gone, yes. So I made it look exactly like the NetApp blog of the time.
So you've written the first summary about this book is awesome and I cannot wait to read it. I'm really, really excited to read it. That's right.
And then I did get some sort of email from the lawyers saying you can't have a fan. Maybe it was an email from Dave Hitz. I can't remember. Yeah, it looks like it was. So email from Dave Hitz saying love the blog. got to change the way it looks. Our lawyers are pretty sure you can't just rip off the look and feel of the NetApp blog.
And when does our persona's mother enter as a kind of a... Pretty early.
Chapter one, Dave hits as... I mean, spoiler for everyone, but please, again, do not read this book. He starts... I mean, I'll give you my copy. Seriously, just hit me up. He starts the book... With the advice, never listen to your mother. Right. That was like chapter one. I think it might have been the title of chapter one or something. Right.
Which is just like, God, he's just putting the ball on the tee for you. Just bait. Right. So then my persona here talks about blowing up his mother. It's like, thank God. It's fun at some point getting some good advice from an adult. That's right. So, yeah. And later on, the big reveal at the end was like, sometimes listen to your mother or something.
I think that was like in one of the later chapters.
When he, at some point has like a comment on your blog being like, God, I don't want to like, I don't want to give it away, but don't take that. Cause you made it very clear that like, you've taken that advice very literally and have, have maybe said some things to your mother that you, maybe you should, maybe you might, might live to regret. That's right. So, okay.
So at this point, so the, then you've got the yes, that Dave hits where he reaches out to you. That's right. Um, and the, uh, from, so he's commenting, we are just having, you should, we were having the time of our lives. I mean, just euphoria.
I mean, I don't know. I like when you, when, I mean, it's so, it's so soft work too, but just like, it's so, it's so great. We've put this, we've launched this little piece of cheese out into the internet.
The mouse is just nibbling away at it, just chopping. The mouse is just pounding on the door, demanding more cheese. Yeah. It's like, oh God, yes, absolutely. So you've got the net app, you've got trade dress, I believe would be the term. May even be the term from the letter they sent you. They'd print out that letter. So they send you basically a cease and desist. That's right.
And then you have, which I just think is like, we're like, God, just another gift from these people. So you have your nonstop lawyers blog entry. Yeah. which I mean, it was just, it was, it was delightful.
I just, I do want to, uh, yeah, I just want to observe like you, you actually wrote some of these entries and I can't remember which ones, but just to throw you under the bus with me. Oh, I will definitely be under the bus with you. Cause when I, and like the Federalist Papers.
Future generations will. Did John Jay write this entry? That's right. Was it Alexander Hamilton? Was it Madison? Was it Madison? We can't know. We can't know. For this entry of nonstophits.blogspot.com, I can't believe this site is still up.
I can't believe blogspot is still a domain that resolves. Uh, so, uh, anyway, short story long. Uh, so I, I did meet Dave hits. I, I got him to, to sign my copy of the book.
Okay. Wait a minute. You get the note from the lawyers and then you change the blog entry to be all in that app trade dress. Do you remember this? You change it to be like all like the Dave hits eyes. That's right. It was just like his eyes everywhere. Yeah. Um, Yeah, so you got him to sign the book.
Got him to sign the book. I said, you know, my buddy can't make it, Dave Lightman. Would you sign it for him? And he said, what's the name of his blog again? And it was, I mean, it speaks volumes that this was sort of like the pinnacle of my pranking. I don't know. Like it was just, it was just, it was so funny to me.
I just like, I could not stop. It is funny. And anyone should be suspicious of a fan blog. I'm sorry. You should just be like, I would like to believe that we would not fall for this. Yeah. And, but here it's like, people are like, all those people pacing for the podcast. No, you all this or all this. Steve hits. That was Dave hits. Uh, it was great. Yeah. Well, it's a miracle that's up.
All right. So we, um, yeah, you, what did you learn? So nonstop hits is again, I do think this is the success teaches you nothing. But you're saying that we, that's not... You wrote the future histories, right?
That one of the practices at NetApp that I remember from a very careful reading of this book was that... There has never been a more careful reading of how to castrate a bull.
100% true. I mean, we poured over it. Like a book club. Like Talmudic scholars, we poured over that. Every diphthong, every syllable, we, I mean, we were... No one has read that book. I mean, it's like in the end, Dave hits... when you encounter this podcast and you're upset, should you be upset? No one read that book more closely than we did. No, we were the biggest fans. We are the biggest fans.
In some regards, we are the biggest fans.
I still have that copy. It's got notes from at least half a dozen people in the margins. Yeah. It's like, yes, it's ironic detachment.
We're Xers. What do you want? Agreed. That's all we have. That's all we have. That's all we have. Leave us with our ironic detachment. Okay. But he, so he advocated the future.
There is one, one, one post-it I want to mention on this. So, uh, we were brought in for you and I, uh, or rather, um, NetApp Sue's son, son Sue's NetApp. Yes. Sort of a thing you may recall. Oh my God. Yeah. Huge lawsuit. And you were brought in, you, you, you, you had a delightful deposition. I was brought in for a deposition as well. And I confess that I was worried. I was worried.
I did not know this. I had forgotten that you were depoed in that case. Yeah, I was depoed in that case. I mean, they were depoing me for stupid reasons. Why were they depoing you?
I'd done a bunch of work in CFS, like in Red Sea and stuff like that. That's true. They actually should do a W versus me. There you go. They took my notebooks in Discovery and like, good luck with that. Joke's on you, pal. Literally, page one of the notebook was this whole description about how we were going to do RAIDZ expansion. So I'm like, oh, dang.
If I just put it on page two, you would have never found it. Right, right. So I'm in this deposition thinking, if they're like, Mr. Leventhal, do you have a blog? I'd be like, yes. Also, I need a break right now. I need a break. I need to talk to my lawyers. Right.
Mr. Leventhal, is the name Dave Lightman familiar to you? It is familiar to me. It is familiar. It is a pop culture reference, as I understand it. Uh, that is great. So you were a little bit worried. Well, you know, did you have a game plan? What were we going to do? Like this goes to nonstop hit stop blogspot.com. Like, uh, like fake a heart attack.
Just do anything.
Like, because you know, when you go into a deposition, you're talking to her, I'd like to declare the fifth. It's like, that's not, you can't do that. This is not a criminal proceedings. You can't declare the fifth.
when you go into a deposition, uh, you know, you're supposed to basically tell your lawyer everything, right? You should, they should like, because they're tell sons lawyers.
No. Oh my God. You should have. No. Oh, you should have. They would have, they would have died laughing. Of course. Oh my God. They would have died laughing. They would have, I love working with the lawyers in that case. They would have loved it. Oh, they would have eaten it up. Anyway. I, I just, I was unclear if we had committed any, like, I don't even know what we did wrong. Actually.
Let's not go there. There we go. Anyway.
Didn't tell the lawyers. I was waiting until the lawyers needed to know and then I was going to tell them in a fake heart attack.
Fake heart attack. You're just like, hey, the ambulance is on the way. It's like, I'm fine.
I'm closer.
I have a lot to tell you. I have a lot to tell you. Right. I have a fake block. You're like, what is going on? These guys, you know, maybe I saw frontiers. Okay. But so he talks about future histories. There you go. Bring it all back. Bring it all back. And is this like this idea of like writing down what we have, what we're going to do? Yeah. It's like, what do you want the press release?
What do you want the success to look like? Right. Like sitting here from the beginning, sitting here from the inception of the idea, what do you want it to look like at the end? What's the story you want to be able to tell? And writing all that down. Exactly.
That is extremely valuable, I think. Yeah, totally. Who knows if they did it, but it's a neat idea. It's a neat idea. And I do think, I mean, I think the written, I do think the written word is really, really, really important. And I think that the Because when you write, you have to get to a ground truth. It does scale.
And people who've come to Oxford are like, oh, this is great because I can understand why they made a past decision. It's been... So I think that that is a very kind of concrete thing that people could do.
Here's what I'm going to say. A little Oxford critique, if you'll forgive me. I think there are some things that we don't write down. Oh, 100%. That maybe not only should be written down, but should be open for revision. So I don't want to do performance reviews of folks. I don't think that's something I've had to do in my career and don't want to do in my career.
There are people at Oxide right now who think that we should do that. And I'll tell you that because I've, I've spoken with them. Right. Yeah. I think even having the discussion, even having the rationale for why we do or don't do things.
Yeah. I think it's important. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, the other thing I'd say is that like, I mean, God, are you, are you just trying to like, do you have a bet with some other oxygen planes? Like I bet I can get him to write an RFD on performance review.
Oh no, no, no, no. It's not like that at all.
No, no, no, no, no. Mayday. Mayday. That's right. Wait a minute. Are you having chest pains right now? What's wrong? My lawyer. Come closer. Um, That's interesting. Yes, in terms of offering that clarity. I think I love it when people are like, I love this company because you've written everything down. And we're like, no. There's a lot that's not written down.
Maybe sometimes it shouldn't be written down because we talked about our discussion of which chat program to use. Obviously, that's way too volatile to write down.
You can't write, you can't, some things you need to leave unsaid. It's just too much of a lightning rod, but no, I think you're right in terms of like, there are things like that. And actually, you know, I honestly, I think there are some things, and this is where I've really benefited.
I mean, this is where you kind of benefit from just a sense of collaboration anyway, because I mean, how many RFDs have you written because someone has said you should write an RFD on that? Like most of them. So in other words, you're thinking of something that like, okay, I'm just like ideating and I don't think this needs to be written down.
You're not necessarily thinking about it like that concretely. But someone else is like, I would actually like to see that written down and you should write an RFD on it. I feel like certainly for me, like most of my RFDs have come from, because people are like, I would like to see an RFD on that. And I was like, oh, yeah, okay. It didn't really occur to me that that's sure. Yeah, absolutely.
We can do that. Yeah. That's a great idea. But it doesn't necessarily occur to you to write down something that you are already kind of feeling very strongly. That's right. But maybe those are the things you should be writing down.
Yeah. And it's a good point that you make that that's the way we communicate those kinds of things. That is how our culture gets codified. And that's not true for everyone, right? Other folks are going to have their culture kind of work its way through the system in different ways.
Yeah, but I do think that if you don't, the less you write down, you're kind of immunocompromised as an organization.
Interesting. Just because you're too susceptible to things changing unseen or people not knowing what True North is.
That's right. Or whatever. Or people coming in being misleading about it. I mean, certainly, you know, We've seen this in past lives where people are, I mean, God forbid, you have someone who's telling different people different things. Yeah, right. Where if you've got it written down, like you can only tell one story, right? You can only tell one story. And that is, it's really, really important.
And I think that like, and sometimes they're not even telling different people different things deliberately. They are, or they don't, or people are hearing different things and they don't realize that people are hearing different things. Yeah.
I mean, so I think that getting, I mean, the question that founders, I don't think anyone should put in front of themselves is like, how do we offer better clarity? Yeah. And then how do we promote trust? I mean, you mentioned it earlier. I do think it's like, man, that is, trust is everything. Trust is everything, for sure. And you've got to figure out like, how do I promote it? How do I build it?
How do I... When it's fractured, how do I repair it? And I think that part of the problem with founder mode at its worst is you have the opportunity to like... do real, real damage to trust. Yeah.
And you know what? Maybe amended trust and clarity or everything because I think absent trust and absent clarity, you can spend a lot of cycles inefficiently. Yes. Worrying about whether you're doing the right things, worrying if you are, how you're being judged by your peers, like working inefficiently. I think it consumes a lot of caloric budget, as you might say, when you're unclear.
It's not a me thing. Some people say caloric budget. Do they not? No. This is like blood over the ear. I assume everyone said blood over the ear, and then I Googled it, and I'm like, no one's using blood over the ear.
They are now.
That's just me. How many things are like that? A caloric budget is like that. I think so. People can correct it from that one, I guess. Deafening silence, but there's no real corrections forthcoming from the chat over here. Yeah, you're right. Damn it. Another intervention. Another podcast, another intervention. There you go. Um, so yeah, sorry.
Clark budget, as I might say, as you say, no, I just mean people spend a lot like lack of certainty. I mean, I think it's one thing to say, Hey, don't worry about all this other stuff. Just focus on this thing.
Yeah.
Like people worry about that other stuff. For sure. If you've told them not to worry about that other stuff, like, yeah, uh, I think, you know, and, um, you know, I mentioned that the RFD episode, um, One of the things I saw at Delphix was everyone had really clear ideas about what we should go do. They were all different. Most of them were terrible.
But even just being able to get those out of their system, let them ignore them. Let them move on past them and just wash their hands of those ideas and move on to the things that did matter.
Yeah, interesting. Yeah, and I think if you called it clarity plus trust mode, it's like, I don't know, that feels like work. Yeah, totally. I think I'd rather go into founder mode. Founder mode sounds a lot more fun. Sounds a little more like Prince Adam becoming He-Man. No, that's right.
You're right. Founder mode is definitely more like... waving your scepter and zapping folks as opposed to like listening to them and wondering what they're about.
It also, I got to tell you, I hear clarity mode and trust mode. I just feel slow and I want to move fast and I want to, I want to move fast and I want to break things. Makes sense. Like, and trust and clarity mode. Take my money. But I think it is worth listening to the Brian Chesky.
Yeah.
Because I think that it was helpful to get that kind of from the source.
Yeah.
And then, like, get as much as possible from the source, I would say, is part of, like, even if it's Dave Hitz. As it turns out, Dave Hitz, nugget of wisdom. Right there, right? As Dennis Ritchie said in his anti-forward to the Unix Haters Handbook, It is an undigested nugget of nutrition in what is otherwise a fecal pie. I just felt that was like one of the greatest. Oh, it's absolutely a keeper.
Dennis Ritchie, rest in peace. this ended up being a good discussion I feel yeah turns out who knew thank you Paul Graham thank you Paul Graham we got to we got to not the pod probably along with that yeah exactly Paul Graham and Dave Hitz listen to this together it's one of their like weekly things that they like to do Their little guilty little pleasures. One of their guilty little pleasures.
Exactly. Well, I think this is it. I know this was a cold take, but I think this was fun. Yeah.
I'm glad we took a little more of a lukewarm take on this one. Because I think there's something there, something worth discussing. And my knee jerk on this was not as helpful.
And I think it's like, and there is something there because I think that the problem is real. And the question is like, how do you, how do you build, how do you build trust? How do you offer clarity to a team? Like that's the challenge. And it's like the way to do that is not to go into seagull mode. Yeah. Can't find a mode. This has been great. It's great to be off our little hiatus.
Maybe this is a good little cooling off period we have. Maybe we should do this more often. We'll come back to tweets that are two weeks old. Good. I'll do more international travel. Sounds good to me. Exactly. It feels like we're more likely to read the tweet in this case, too. All right. It was fun, and we will see everyone next time.
Thanks, everybody. Thanks. The Nazi nonstop hits. We're still here. Adam, the Nazi nonstop hits coming up. Don't believe it.