I think the key difference is that a founder has a much better understanding of the company as a complex system. This understanding includes not just how people think it works at a certain point. It includes all the previous attempts, reasoning behind those attemps, the context of past failures and successes, the personal dynamics behind those choices.
Complex systems are notoriously hard to understand. Seeing the system develop from zero to complexity is an experience and perspective that is impossible to replace. Even most early employees don't have a comparable understanding.
Of course not all founders know everything about all the key components of their businesses, but the founding team does have a much much better understanding than other person. I think that's why founders get frustrated with ineffective things. While most others have to account for unknown unknowns and give others benefit of doubt, the founders have a much better and robust understanding of why things happen the way they happen.
The difference between management and leadership may be more about where you focus and how you engage others. Being a founder and being a leader is different in how well you understand the system.
I think there is an interesting question in: should more founders be public market CEOs leading their vision? That is a super interesting question imo. We had a lot of discussion about this at DigitalOcean pre ipo, it's the main reason I left, and after I left the CEO was still my best friend and after a lot of conversation, he didn't feel like public market exec sounded that interesting either, the whole founding leadership team switched over. I'm not sure about the other guys, but a couple of us basically said "we're founders not public market execs" and bowed out. I say kudos to Brian, Jeff Lawson, Matthew Prince etc for doing both, because I've heard that the job in the public markets can get brutal.
But in my experience a good founder doesn’t necessarily make a good leader. Not a CEO anyway, but it depends on the role of the CEO. If the the CEO is “chief strategy and opportunity officer” then some founders are often quite well suited to it.
But we should bear in mind that all founders do not have the same skill set. Woz was also a founder of Apple and a great engineer but not a CEO.
Pedantically, literally everyone can be a founder.
At this moment, you can decide that you are starting a company. You are now a founder.
(This is why Founder is historically an unprestigious job that smells a lot like Unemployed, though the startup hype cycle of the last 15 years changed that.)
“Along with David Sloan Wilson, director of the evolutionary studies program at Binghamton University, and Ian MacDonald, a graduate assistant, they contacted more than 1,000 people living in 174 communities across the U.S. and Canada and asked them to rate their happiness level on the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS), a globally recognized measurement tool. They compared these results to a widely cited 2008 study by the psychologists William Pavot and Ed Diener, which surveyed past studies that used the scale to analyze 31 disparate populations — including Dutch adults, French-Canadian university students and the Inuit of northern Greenland — and discovered that members of intentional communities scored higher than 30 of the 31 groups.“
A part of me always resisted the idea that these communities could work, but, this study is enough of a reason to make me a believer.
That depends (almost) entirely on whether the land is public or private, and whether it is local municipal, state or federally owned land, and whether that land has special protections or not.
For example, planting things (or disturbing existing things) on private land or state or national parks is generally illegal and enforced (assuming you get caught, of course).
Planting anything on a controlled list (such that it is considered invasive or otherwise dangerous) is also generally prohibited and enforced.
If it's not one of those things, then it's generally going to be ignored as harmless. If something were to grow to a height such that it obstructs important views (i.e. of a pedestrian crosswalk), or poses a risk of falling on something (a poorly managed tree leaning over a road) then the city or state would likely tear it out. By that point, though, it's not too likely that you'll get the blame for planting it in the first place if you're acting as an individual.
All of this, of course, is just speculation based on assumptions about the potential hypothetical circumstances. IANAL and you would certainly want to think carefully about what you do to property that isn't your own.
There are many species able to create damages by several millions of dollars (Not, I'm not joking).
Genetic contamination of endangered native plants with hybrids that are almost identical (or had being genetically modified), would be also a huge mistake
This video made me cringe. I am not surprised to see a commercial appropriating feel-good videos. Somehow, seeing especially Google do this makes me feel more disappointed. They are just another big corporation. Maybe, I believe they are capable of doing heroic stuff and I don't see them actually doing it.
The heuristic of trying to work on what you genuinely love is not helpful or practical for most people. It sounds good, but it is just a platitude.
Genuine love and fake love feel and look pretty similar. Most people naturally start loving the life they live in, if it is generally positive. Then, they make up a self-affirming, coherent narrative that justifies their emotions, decisions, and interests. If you do an AI startup, life goes well for you, and you embrace that decision and life, how can you differentiate whether it was really a genuine interest or not?
Cal Newport makes the good point that people learn to like/love things after they get very good at it, whatever “it” is.
I love Joseph Campbell but his advice to his students to “follow their bliss” may not always be optimal.
I read the AI book “Mind Inside Matter” in the late 1970s, and even though I have done a ton of non-AI architecture and software development, I have also been able to work on AI problems like knowledge representation, expert system, NLP, neural networks, and deep learning starting in 1982. I definitely followed my bliss, but I have never been world class in my profession, but I have enjoyed myself.
> Most people naturally start loving the life they live in, if it is generally positive.
The platitude is directed toward those living a life they feel is negative, but who slog through for whatever reason: fear of change, obligation to other people, etc.
Taken as feel-good, head-in-the-sand optimism, of course it's facile advice.
But imo there is genuine wisdom in it, and it's this: You are much more likely to do something well, and to continue to do it until you reach a high-level of expertise, if you don't have to force yourself to do it. People who naturally love working out are more likely to be fit. That's what the heuristic is.
The other side of this problem is that more than one billion people around the world can't afford glasses.
"More than a billion people around the world need eyeglasses but don’t have them, researchers say, an affliction long overlooked on lists of public health priorities. Some estimates put that figure closer to 2.5 billion people. They include thousands of nearsighted Nigerian truck drivers who strain to see pedestrians darting across the road and middle-aged coffee farmers in Bolivia whose inability to see objects up close makes it hard to spot ripe beans for harvest. Then there are the tens of millions of children like Shivam across the world whose families cannot afford an eye exam or the prescription eyeglasses that would help them excel in school."
VisionSpring, a social venture, provides people glasses - which they say costs them $4-5 each. They claim that uncorrected refractive error costs the global economy an estimated $227 billion a year.
https://visionspring.org/why-eyeglasses
I think the key difference is that a founder has a much better understanding of the company as a complex system. This understanding includes not just how people think it works at a certain point. It includes all the previous attempts, reasoning behind those attemps, the context of past failures and successes, the personal dynamics behind those choices.
Complex systems are notoriously hard to understand. Seeing the system develop from zero to complexity is an experience and perspective that is impossible to replace. Even most early employees don't have a comparable understanding.
Of course not all founders know everything about all the key components of their businesses, but the founding team does have a much much better understanding than other person. I think that's why founders get frustrated with ineffective things. While most others have to account for unknown unknowns and give others benefit of doubt, the founders have a much better and robust understanding of why things happen the way they happen.
The difference between management and leadership may be more about where you focus and how you engage others. Being a founder and being a leader is different in how well you understand the system.