Jonathan Lowenhar: belief

Transcript context

…Do share. It really felt like an excuse. We were giving founders a permission to not learn the job. If we think about an ascending startup, there's this phase of I have to invent something. I now have to figure out how to get my customer in front of this invention and see if it works, and then I have to build a business model around that to see if there's some repeatable way to attract, win, deploy my customer and thrill them with whatever the solution is. Okay, now I have to go build an enormous amount of demand and then I have to build up an operation that can handle all that demand. Oh, and by the way, at some point, figure out how to turn positive revenues into positive cash flows. The idea that the founder who's writing code by themselves doesn't have to advance their skills to learn how to do all those things, and that in fact what the article even implies is learning how to do those other things is a negative is bananas to me. The things required to launch a company are not the same as grow a company as scale a company as exit a company, and the best startup CEOs learn them all along the way. There are lots of ways to learn them. I'm not suggesting there's only one path, but founder mode was almost an excuse not to. I do think what's unique about a founder that felt perhaps where that article was trying to go is that unlike the professional mercenary CEO that gets dropped in, the founder knows everything about what built this company and they can drop in at the most granular level and play anywhere. They can drop into a product feature, they can drop into a customer conversation or a partner conversation or with a long-time employee that's still in IC and be impactful and then rise back up if they've gone the training and get back into a cockpit to run the company again. That's to me the distinction. It's not manager mode is bad, it's the greatest CEOs know when to calibrate which one is needed. I love that. I'm glad we got there. I wasn't planning to talk about founder mode, but I think this is really helpful for folks to hear that are founders and people working for founders too. Along these same lines, you have a really helpful and really funny also mental model for how to think about common failure modes of founders. You have these labels that I love, and this is actually the first thing I heard about Enjoy The Work is these labels that you guys use, and you also, a similar mental model for failure modes for a startup. Can you just share these modes that you've come up with?…

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