Founders, comedians, and unspoken truths
The best founders in the world are like comedians:
- They have a knack for identifying unspoken truths
- And they have the courage to tell the world, even when uncomfortable. They say the thing no one else is willing to say.
I was reflecting recently on the phenomenon of bureaucracy. I think it may be the biggest “Abilene Paradox” in the world. (The Abilene Paradox is a situation where a group of people make a collective decision that none of them actually want, because each member wrongly assumes that the others in the group are in favor of the decision, and so they go along with it.)
Have you ever met someone who wants bureaucracy? I haven't! No one wants it, yet it happens anyway. And it keeps happening! Everywhere you look, everywhere you go: bureaucracy. It’s an iron law of the universe—where there are people trying to build something together, bureaucracy will emerge.
We could spend an entire book on why this happens, but for now, let’s just say bureaucracy is everywhere, even at startups, and it’s an extremely uncomfortable truth for a founder to have to call out when the time comes.
But it’s not just bureaucracy that founders must wage war against. It’s any and all forms of nonsense.
They must resist allowing their most productive employees to be snowed under by mountains of meetings when async communication would do just as well. (Tobi Lutke and Shopify)
They must ban “work from home,” which seems to work okay for a few elite companies (e.g., Linear), but which on the whole has been a disaster for productivity, company culture, and nonsense. (David Solomon and Goldman Sachs, Elon Musk and Tesla, Reed Hastings and Netflix)
They must eliminate partisan politics and culture wars from taking root in Slack channels before the entire company is distracted or staging “walk outs”. (Brian Armstrong and Coinbase)
They must eliminate people who don’t actually do anything! Engineering teams in particular should be reduced by 50-75% at many big tech companies. (Elon Musk and Twitter)
A startup founder has few more important roles than dismantling nonsense. Paul Graham calls it “pruning bullshit,” which has a nice ring. Anything that actively gets in the way of a company being single-minded about the thing it should be pursuing is worth calling out and fighting. Employees should fight the BS too, but the founders must set the tone. To do this well, they should aim to think like comedians.