At a YC event last week Brian Chesky gave a talk that everyone who was there will remember. Most founders I talked to afterward said it was the best they'd ever heard. Ron Conway, for the first time in his life, forgot to take notes. I'm not going to try to reproduce it here. Instead I want to talk about a question it raised.

One theme I noticed both in the talk of Brian Chesky and when talking to founders afterward was the idea of being gaslit. Founders feel like they're being gaslit from both sides - by the people telling them they have to run their companies like managers, and by the people working for them when they do.

Usually when everyone around you disagrees with you, your default assumption should be that you're mistaken. But this is one of the rare exceptions. VCs who haven't been founders themselves don't know how founders should run companies, and C-level execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the world.

The more diplomatic way of phrasing this statement would be to say that experienced C-level execs are often very skilled at managing up. And I don't think anyone with knowledge of this world would dispute that.

(c) Paul Graham, The Founder Mode, September 2024: https://paulgraham.com/foundermode.html