Manager vs Founder The Silicon Valley Debate Explored

There's a big debate that's roiling Silicon Valley right now. It's the manager versus founder debate started by Paul Graham, who was the founder of Y Combinator. And it basically goes like this. If you're a manager, you're really interested in managing and procedure and things like that. But if you're a founder, you live over the garage, you come in, you know everything, you take care of every problem, you dive into everything. And there's a big difference between the two. You think about it. Manager is a little bit more like, let's work with people, let's make things happen, let's figure out the process, let's hire smart people and give them things to do. Whereas the founder is all about micromanagement and knowing everything and making sure that you're on top of every problem out there. Okay, it's a really interesting thing to think about from a startup perspective, but in the creator economy, we need to have this debate too. There's been a lot of talk about the COO, and as a creator, should bring in a COO to run things so the creator can just create. But if you think about it, a creator is a founder, and the creator needs to really be involved in so many things up into a certain point. Now, arguably, if you look at where MrBeast is right now, MrBeast has been in founder mode for probably too long. They should have switched to manager mode maybe a year or two ago. Uh, they're sort of getting there now. But I'm trying to think of other successful shifts from creator mode to manager mode, or, you know, from startup mode to manager mode. And I can only think of 3. There's Brian over at Good Mythical. There's Ale over at Smosh, and then there's Jim Lee over at Mark Rober's business CrunchLabs. I know there are others out there, but there's been a big trend to go COO, COO, COO, and maybe, just maybe, that is a little misguided. Let me know what you think down in the comments. And I wrote about this in this week's newsletter, which you should absolutely subscribe to. It's free here on LinkedIn or on Beehive. And, uh, this is just one of the 37 things I talked about this week, so give it a read.