maintaining a startup founder management style even after scaling up; see (2024-09-01) Graham Founder Mode

Dave Karpf: Paul Graham and the Cult of the Founder Paul Graham has been bad for Silicon Valley. Without Paul Graham, we would not have YCombinator. And YCombinator is, chiefly, the Cult of the Founder. Silicon Valley would be so much better off without it. The companies that came out of YCombinator would be better off if their leaders weren’t so convinced of their own moral superiority. (more)

Petter Holme: The holistic tribes. This blog post is hopefully the beginning of the lecture notes for an upcoming course. Ultimately, I want to rectify the story of the development of ideas around complex systems, which has neither been a steady and well-informed progression nor a succession of Kuhnian paradigm shifts, but rather something messy and disconnected (more)

Melissa Perri: My thoughts on "Founder Mode" and why it's dangerous. I had dinner with a few Product Leaders in Berlin the other night that turned into a discussion on how they can work better with founder CEOs. This has always been a tense subject, and I’ve seen a lot of friction firsthand between these two groups. Now, I’m worried this article is going to make it worse. (more)

Ian Betteridge on Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech. ....the whole founder mode thing is a hot mess is that Paul Graham is entirely wrong about management and leadership (more)

Bob Marshall: Business Doctrine. What is Business? (more)

Agile Software Development guru (one of the Agile Manifesto authors)

Gary Klein (born February 5, 1944, in New York City, New York, U.S.) is a research psychologist famous for pioneering in the field of naturalistic decision making.[1] By studying experts such as firefighters in their natural environment, he discovered that laboratory models of decision making could not describe it under uncertainty. His recognition-primed decision (RPD) model has influenced changes in the ways the Marines and Army train their officers to make decisions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_A._Klein (more)

web-based MindMapping app - kinda similar to FreeMind, imports/exports FreeMind, has quick-keys so it's faster to make outline-type-notes than something like Miro. https://www.mindmup.com/ (more)

Dan Davies: the general theory of founders, managers and systems. I’ve been fascinated by the fact that left to themselves in charge of something, intelligent people with an engineering background will always seem to independently come up with something that looks quite like Stafford Beer’s cybernetics... Obviously therefore the first thing that struck me about the “founder mode” essay is that there’s a hell of a lot of cybernetics-adjacent material in there – he even talks about black boxes! (2024-09-01) Graham Founder Mode (more)

Paul Graham on Founder Mode. At a YC event last week Brian Chesky gave a talk that everyone who was there will remember... The theme of Brian's talk was that the conventional wisdom about how to run larger companies is mistaken. As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised him that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale. Their advice could be optimistically summarized as "hire good people and give them room to do their jobs." He followed this advice and the results were disastrous. (more)

Cybernetics-based BigGov experiment? (more)

Eden Medina is Associate Professor of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University Bloomington and the author of Cybernetic Revolutionaries ISBN:9780262525961 (2014). https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262525961/cybernetic-revolutionaries/

Dan Davies: the statistical heart of the system. This is now an occasional series of pieces related to what did and didn’t go on in Allende’s Chile when Stafford Beer was involved in the big experiment in running an economy on cybernetic principles. One thing I’ve tried to emphasise so far is that CYBERSYN really, really wasn’t a “planned economy”. (more)

Cosma Shalizi on Project Cybersyn. Initial notes, January 2022....This has something of a cult following among contemporary socialists, in no small part, I suspect, because of the period glamour of the photographs of the control room, and because of the aura of righteous martyrdom given the fate of Allende and his government (more)

Karl Schroeder: Retiring Geopolitics. I started Unapocalyptic with a couple of goals. Not quite manifestos, these are certainly lines in the sand. (more)

The Santiago Boys — a podcast series by Evgeny Morozov. Cybersyn is an oft-referred to hypothetical in the socialist calculation debate (more)

Why AI Can Push You to Make the Wrong Decision at Work. Chatbots help craft emails and act as customer support. Algorithms help banks decide loan eligibility and assist in reviewing job applications. AI is gaining a foothold in many workplaces, aggregating information and helping people make smarter decisions. At least that’s how AI is sold. (more)

Nathaniel Read Silver (born January 13, 1978) is an American statistician, writer, and poker player who analyzes baseball, basketball, and elections. He is the founder of FiveThirtyEight, and held the position of editor-in-chief there, along with being a special correspondent for ABC News, until May 2023.[2] Since departing FiveThirtyEight, Silver has been publishing on his Substack blog Silver Bulletin[3] and serves as an advisor to Polymarket.[4] Silver was named one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time in 2009 after an election forecasting system he developed successfully predicted the outcomes in forty-nine of the fifty states in the 2008 U.S. presidential election.[5] His subsequent election forecasting systems predicted the outcome of the 2012 and 2020 presidential elections with a high degree of accuracy. His polls-only model gave Donald Trump, the ultimate winner, only a 28.6% chance of victory in the 2016 presidential election,[6] although this was higher than any other forecasting competitors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nate_Silver

Something to Change The World (Technological Determinism, Technological Revolution) (Evolution) (to solve a Grand Challenge?) (more)