I wonder about the sibling comment about survivorship bias.<p>Specifically, I wonder if the reason "founder mode" strikes singular founders as a resonant story, is because it's representative of a story that can even have a singular narrative. The alternative (what pg calls "manager mode" of hiring the best people and letting them work) is perhaps one where there's more narratives unfolding and exploring the space. This could lead to either success or failure. Some spaces have less of a singular story, because they run and persist and thrive based on having multiple stories working together. Sometime the stories are dissonant. I've been in companies where the strength felt like it was in how a balance of things existed together, without the need to collapse them into a single totalizing narrative. This unresolved dissonance in a community can be either a weakness or a strength. The ability for a place or an organization or a community or a culture to hold contradictory truths, this allows a culture to hold within arms-reach an archive of more tactics and strategies (some useful in the current moment, some not), from which to call on when the environment changes, and new needs arise. That's how vibrant ecologies work.<p>Anyhow, this is a bit of a riff, and I imagine some people might be strongly opposed. I am not saying it's good or bad to be in founder mode. I'm saying it depends. But founder mode will tend to create singular founders who have a loud story to tell. The story is maybe less clear and loud when the other mode prevails and leads to success. It looks like a hundred ppl succeeding together, and no one person has the answer as to why, nor do they all agree on what that is. So it means that narrative will be more diffuse and less boosted.<p>Maybe more holographic in a metaphorical sense, where the information is encoded throughout a social fabric like a diffraction pattern, and no one person holds the whole narrative or truth, which emerges from the interaction of many narratives, both aligned and opposing (likely in small ways below the surface).<p>Context: I co-founded a tech community in Toronto (now ~7000 people), which for almost 9 years has run weekly participatory civic events (50-70 attendees), literally without ever missing a week yet. To put it lightly, we've learned a bit about distributed leadership, and my comments comes from that experience. It's very different from company modes, but some companies run on principles I feel quite aligned on.