Christian Catalini
@catalini
1/ Startups are vessels traveling through uncertainty. PG’s “founder mode” is about fighting information degradation. This means not hiring people who have perfected managing up—much of big tech selects for this!—but have terrible judgment, ideas or ability to drive results.
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Christian Catalini
@catalini
2/ Or if you already have, rapidly rely on skip-level conversations to understand what your team is truly learning from the environment. As you scale, some founders—like @barmstrong and Musk—heavily prioritize talent density and skunkworks teams as the antidote.
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Christian Catalini
@catalini
3/ The problem is not with delegation or managers per se, but with how information degrades as it moves through the organization. What may seem like an invitation to micromanage should, in fact, be viewed as an effort to “microlearn” and make better decisions.
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Christian Catalini
@catalini
4/ What’s truly scarce is good judgment and decision-making based on the best available information. It is what will make or break a startup.
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Christian Catalini
@catalini
5/ AI will only exacerbate this problem by providing founders with better information and low-cost predictions, which, in turn, will make good judgment even more scarce! (Ajay Agrawal and coauthors books on the topic).
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Christian Catalini
@catalini
6/ Great ideas can come from anyone, and it’s the founder’s job to create an environment where they can surface and thrive. Managers who prioritize optics over results degrade information and idea diffusion and demoralize the most talented and entrepreneurial.
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Christian Catalini
@catalini
7/ Under “manager mode”, bad choices at the top—driven by poor information—slow progress, drive talent away, and set off a negative feedback loop that unravels the startup.
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