Great writeup. With LLMs doing an increasing amount of the coding now, it would be great for the browser or development environment to have built-in validations that enforce good performance. The coding agent (or human) would get direct, immediate feedback at development time that there's a performance threshold violation, at development time.
As both a 4x founder and recovering manager-of-managers, I have to say Founder-vs.-Manager is a bit of a false dichotomy.
Interestingly, the most successful managers I've seen have themselves been founders. They had both autonomy and organizational trust, and also tenacious creativity, which led to significant successes. This binary notion of "are you a Manager™ or are you a Founder™?" is a false dichotomy and leaves great people out.
A founder mentality has certain recognizable characteristics: doing whatever it takes to succeed, applying creative solutions to challenging problems, going outside your lane to win, and putting in energy well beyond the standard 9-5 expected of a standard employee. You can hire talented people with such qualities AND build an organization with trust and autonomy. Bringing it back to Chesky's disastrous results with delegation, I'd ask this: Did he just hire bad people?
This dichotomy may at worst cause an entire generation of new founders to ignore really fantastic advice, "Hire really great people, and give them the support and space to succeed." This is not antithetical to: "Oh, and those people should look like founders." It's a Both, not One-or-the-Other.
All this said, I do think PG is touching on something super interesting, which is an almost anthropological understanding of "The Founder", and view that as a very important area of discourse and study for the next generation of great companies.
The point that both PG and BC are really trying to say is that rigid, hierarchical employee types are detrimental to company's long-term success, and instead you should be building your team with hungry, bright, and creative problemsolvers who aren't afraid to break artificial rules to succeed. But you sure as hell be building an organization with trust and giving those founder-types everything they need to succeed.
I think the dichotomy is a gross simplification when presented as a single style or piece of advice to be implemented globally. The challenge of the founder is to know what is the truly important part of their product/market and exercise a Founder mode style for those areas. It's where your time as a founder is most valuable. There's reason most of the Steve Jobs tales are from product design perspective. I expect he knew that was, or would be, a significant differentiator of his product. Yet, as his company was scaling he likely was pulled in many more directions regarding other concerns of a scaling company as all founders would be (HR, Accounting, etc), and he knew that's where you exercise Manager mode. Hire a good head of HR and CFO and let them do their job. It's not worth his time to invest much effort in those types of functional minutia although they are very important and necessary parts of scaling.
Looks very intriguing, will give this a try. As a windowing and task switching productivity nut, I built my own replacement for ⌘+Tab, Switcheroo. Check it out here: https://switchfaster.com/
Known for first-to-market solutions for modern family challenges, Life360 recently reached #1 in Apple’s US App Store’s list of free social networking apps. Nearly 1 in 10 US families with kids use Life360 an average of 12 times a day, and global membership is growing exponentially, with over 28 million active users in over 140 countries as of March 31, 2020 — making Life360 the largest mobile service for families in the world.
We’re looking for engineering managers to support this growth. In this role, you'll lead a team of 5 - 10 engineers, working closely with your direct reports, product managers, designers, test engineers, and other engineering teams to build the future of Life360.
Things we love:
• 6+ years of real-world development experience
• 4+ year of managerial experience
• Hands on experience managing a team of 6+ engineers
• Experience managing offshore teams
• Experience with hiring and building engineering teams
Life360 | Backend / iOS / Android / Data Science / Testing | San Francisco & San Diego, CA & REMOTE
25 million monthly active users.
Doubled userbase year-over-year.
Public company with real revenue.
Bringing peace of mind to families with technology.
We're hiring engineers for our back-end Cloud Engineering, Mobile, and Test teams to help us scale up globally. Our tech stack in total handles over 5 billion API requests daily, so if you know your way around AWS microservices and love writing efficient fault-tolerant code, we would love to chat.
With over 25 million monthly active users and a recent IPO on the Australian Stock Exchange, Life360 is the world’s largest mobile app for families. Today, we are focused on location sharing and safety, and our mission is to become the must-have Family Membership that gives families peace of mind anytime and anywhere. From personalized location-based alerts that help make daily coordination easier, to advanced sensor tech that can detect a car crash and automatically send you an ambulance, we are leveraging smartphones to their fullest extent to reinvent how families get through the day.
- Full-time
- Locations: San Francisco, California; San Diego, California; Remote
- Competitive salary and stock options
- $200/month Quality of Life perk
- Great office in SoMa: dogs are welcome, tons of snacks, and great catered lunches
Life360 | Backend / iOS / Android / Data Science / Testing | San Francisco & San Diego, CA & REMOTE
25 million monthly active users.
Doubled userbase year-over-year.
Public company with real revenue.
Bringing peace of mind to families with technology.
We're hiring engineers for our back-end Cloud Engineering and Mobile teams to help us scale up globally. Our tech stack in total handles over 5 billion API requests daily, so if you know your way around AWS microservices and love writing efficient fault-tolerant code, we would love to chat.
With over 25 million monthly active users and a recent IPO on the Australian Stock Exchange, Life360 is the world’s largest mobile app for families. Today, we are focused on location sharing and safety, and our mission is to become the must-have Family Membership that gives families peace of mind anytime and anywhere. From personalized location-based alerts that help make daily coordination easier, to advanced sensor tech that can detect a car crash and automatically send you an ambulance, we are leveraging smartphones to their fullest extent to reinvent how families get through the day.
- Full-time
- Locations: San Francisco, California; San Diego, California; Remote
- Competitive salary and stock options
- $200/month Quality of Life perk
- Great office in SoMa: dogs are welcome, tons of snacks, and great catered lunches
Life360 | iOS Growth Engineer | San Francisco, CA | Onsite
20 million monthly active users.
Doubled userbase year-over-year.
Tripled revenue year-over-year.
Bringing peace of mind to families with technology.
We're hiring an iOS engineer to join our newly-formed Growth team to help us scale up globally. If you know iOS, and have experience with different technologies like web / backend / Android, or are particularly hungry to learn, we want to work with you.
With over 20 million active users and $90 million in venture funding, Life360 is the world’s largest mobile app for families. Today, we are focused on location sharing and safety, but our mission is to become the must-have Family Membership that gives families peace of mind anytime and anywhere. From personalized location-based alerts that help make daily coordination easier, to advanced sensor tech that can detect a car crash and automatically send you an ambulance, we are leveraging smartphones to their fullest extent to reinvent how families get through the day.
- Full-time
- Location: San Francisco, California
- Competitive salary and stock options
- $200/month Quality of Life perk
- Great office in SOMA: dogs are welcome, tons of snacks, and great catered lunches
- Autonomous team with lots of support from around the company
use semantic class names sunglasses emoji It's descriptive, faster, cleaner and easier to maintain."
Semantic class names!? Brilliant. Does it seem like the web is reinventing itself to anyone else?