Paul Graham and the Cult of the Founder

https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/paul-graham-and-the-cult-of-the-founder

by kemayo • 2 years ago

20 4 2 years ago

davekarpf.substack.com

PaulHoule• 2 years ago

The story of Wozniak is funny because he was a genius at putting together things like video and drive controllers out of discrete parts but he did not make the transition to the ASIC age.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_integrate...

The 1977 trinity microcomputers used a lot of discrete logic and had an awful cost structure compared to further generations of computers like the TRS-80 Color Computer, VIC-20, C-64 that were build around ASIC. Apple had no idea that it was still going to be making the ][ in 1993 so it had a crash program to develop lemons like the /// and the Lisa, even the 68k Macintosh struggled. They added ASIC to the Apple //e in 1983 which they probably could have done in 1981 had they been taking the ][ as seriously as they should have. In an alternate timeline the //gs could have taken the place of the Macintosh.

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For other founders stories I’d put out Mark Zuckerberg who might not have had what it took to make Facebook a going concern without the help of Sheryl Sandberg. Today he’s seen as making tone deaf and cringey decisions and you can debate whether he should be at the helm much like one can debate if Andy Warhol was a good artist or not.

I worked at another place where the investors seemed to believe our founder had a good vision (I did!) but they didn’t trust him in execution. Things were pretty disorganized, some in ways that were endemic to our “go to market” plan, but we did not get help, instead we got OKRs (“there is only one goal” [1]) and had our funding released in dribs and drabs which didn’t help us maintain direction. We had a genius at business development but amazingly the eng manager had no idea how long the system took to build, told me they were catching errors with monads in Scalia (they weren’t) and that they were doing code reviews (if they were wouldn’t they know they weren’t catching errors?), etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel)

KerrAvon• 2 years ago

The story of Wozniak is funny because he was a genius at putting together things like video and drive controllers out of discrete parts but he did not make the transition to the ASIC age.

I think that's astute, although his stuff was eventually incorporated into ASICs by others.

In an alternate timeline the //gs could have taken the place of the Macintosh

ProDOS instead of MS-DOS as a basis for everyone's personal computing experience would be a real trip.

But I agree with you: Apple ceded the entire PC business market to IBM, and that didn't need to happen. IBM would have taken a big chunk of it no matter what -- some people were waiting for them -- but Apple could have done much better with an improved Apple II lineup circa 1981.

tim333• 2 years ago

Bit of a miserable article. The author seems to be a lefty professor who likes trade unions and doesn't really like entrepreneurs.

The essay and main HN on Founder Mode are good https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41415023

zichy• 2 years ago

A lefty professor who likes trade unions sounds like a horrible person! /s

Paul Graham and the Cult of the Founder

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