NGL, the pronunciation of Waikiki as “Why, Kiki?” made me laugh out loud.

This is the same thing I tell entrepreneurs.

At least with startups you can get lucky.

Writing (or producing) something memorable requires something more.

The author keeps mentioning capital-E “Elites” and never names one or even defines what that means.

My Spidey senses go off whenever someone uses an undefined label to describe a sweeping societal change.

And, yes, it is all about real estate.

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.”

yes, correct.

You cannot get involved in every decision as a CEO of a large company. Suppose you did a skip level meeting. Who is going to gaslight you more, the lower level person or your direct report with a massive stock award who is incentivized for the company to succeed? far from clear.

“they also told me my usage was higher than other developers...”

Next you’ll tell me that they’re NOT actually experiencing higher-than-normal call volumes!

"We've understaffed our call center" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Not relying on your network sounds like terrible advice.

Employee: “Hello, hiring manager. I know an incredible candidate for that job we posted last week.”

Hiring manager: “Thanks, employee, but we have hundreds of resumes from strangers, so we don’t need to talk to your contact.”

I’m not saying that never happens? But I am saying that it happens rarely enough that you shouldn’t use it to guide your networking strategy.

Networking is gold for everyone.

Hey - you're looking for a job? Come work here PLEASE!! As a company you can get folks who'd otherwise go elsewhere as well this way because process can be shorter - you've already worked with them maybe in other contexts etc.

One issue now with hiring is just the crap you have to wade through. When hiring was local and/or in office interviews it was one thing - but now it's honestly wild. The number of responses is INSANE. I used to make a point to read every resume (just a glance at least) - that's impossible now (it's slow anyways on a lot of sites to flip through resumes).

Outsourcing is definitely up as well since overall remote is up and has made that easier.

Then you've got scammers - we've definitely contracted with one person, and when talking with them later its a different person entirely. Ie, email grammar falls into trash.

In my experience, in bigger companies hiring managers seem to dislike this kind of "nepotism". The best they do normally these days is to give you the hr/recruitment email to send your application to. This is just some real-life experience based on recent job hunting.

aka “Galt’s speech reformatted for TikTok”

Tell us more about the moochers, please?

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.

Because these are all voluntary standards. If you want your content to be discoverable and accessible, you don’t get to dictate how someone renders it. If you want to force monetization, adopt a different business model.

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.

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.

Has a lot of similarities to Knotwords (https://playknotwords.com/). I like both implementations. Well done!