It’s interesting that Graham doesn’t seem to say what Founder Mode looks like in any capacity, other than referring to a few outlier founders.
Less than one quarter of companies that go public do so with their original CEO.
Most people would say that indicates Founder Mode doesn’t generally work as companies scale.
It looks like Graham feels that it’s because too many founders listen to common wisdom and eventually get pushed out / leave?
I honestly don’t buy it. In order to scale, companies have to learn how to operationalize more and more processes. This fundamentally looks like “hiring people and giving them the space and authority to operate.”
I feel like his entire post could have been reframed as “just as VCs know there are relatively few excellent founders and identifying them is hard, there are similarly few excellent executives and identifying them is also hard.”
I don’t think you’re following my point (I probably explained it poorly).
People voluntarily agreed to follow the robots.txt model when they could have ignore it. To this day, a plurality of people seem to support that standard.
That doesn’t keep content from being discoverable or accessible. All sorts of ways to find web sites outside of sites that use crawlers — directories, web rings, social media, etc.
There could have been an ads.txt model, but people probably would have likely ignored it. Your response would seem to be the norm for defending ad blockers — you somehow have a right to the content and if they can’t force you to view their ad, that’s on them.
Why do people get to dictate who accesses a page but not how it’s accessed? That binary seems completely arbitrary.
With all the ad blockers out there, which functionally demonetize content sites, why isn’t there an ad equivalent to robots.txt that says “don’t display this site if ads are blocked”?
So many good comments from several points of view in this thread and the thing I can’t square is the same person championing ad blockers and condemning agents like Perplexity.
Gaslighting has a very specific definition — lying to someone in a way that causes them to question their own reasoning or grasp on reality.
For folks who are just finding out they never stood a chance because Google does indeed have a “small site” designation, they probably feel pretty manipulated.
I’d rather not have tens of thousands of small business owners wasting their time trying to figure me out how to work within Google’s system when it’s all a tissue of lies.