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Comment by jesuscript | Hacker News Reader

The original creator of the company will care about that because they know why they are trying to solve the problem. Everyone that comes after will not. This is natural. Everyone after sees the validation of the product as a validation of a money printing machine and will look to run just that - a money printing machine.

Hate to deify a Steve Jobs, as if he needs more god-like overtures, but that is what will always make him different than your Tim Cooks of the world (or your Sundar Pichais of the world as opposed to Larry or Sergey, your Activision-Blizzard management versus just the original Blizzard team).

Two completely different types of animals. In a sense, that’s why we usually describe this loss as a company’s soul leaving it. The why goes missing and the what, which is always money, is all that’s left.

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I'm racking my brain trying to remember where I heard it, but I've heard it roughly summarized as: Companies are founded by people who are loyal to a vision, but tend to promote people who are loyal to the company. Eventually the people who are loyal to the company have all of the power. The people loyal to the vision are only left in the lower ranks, if at all.

Amen to that.

I am living that particular dream (nightmare) as are a handful of us 'vision loyalists'.

At least people who are loyal to the company care about the long term viability of the company. I think Cook, Nadella and Jassy (my skip*7 manager) care about the company. I don’t know what the hell Pichai cares about.

Google has the focus and the vision of a crack addled flea.

Google was organized such that the founder didn't have to do much, but that also means that the CEO doesn't have much power to run things so Pichai would need to rebuild the whole company to start to change how things are run.

This is the reason why Google can launch so many products, but also why they can cancel so many products: there is no person holding the reins and instead middle managers just go off and do their own thing. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook all have a clear power center created by the founders, Google doesn't have that which is why they are so much more unpredictable.

Unpredictability and no consolidated central authority can be good. Prevents stagnation.

It can also mean rampant unchecked spending and a plethora of dead projects resulting in a tarnished reputation.

It can also mean introducing three incompatible messaging apps in one year.

It seems like the best model of Sundar Pichai's behavior is someone who myopically cares about his own career. He puts most of his effort into looking smart and avoiding offending people.

Honestly, Ruth Porat seems to run most of the impactful decisions at the C-level, and that's a good thing.

What impactful product has Google introduced in the last 10 years?

I see no real conflict between "making impactful decisions" and "not introducing any new products of any kind".

This rings a bell for me too... have you read Developer Hegemony? It reminds me of that book.

Marc Andreessen said something very similar on a podcast with Sam Harris: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/290...

"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy"

He said it first, but I think your paraphrase is at least as good as the original formulation.

The shareholders won't care about that, but a private owned company can care about it. Even successors. Startups generally attempt to become publicly owned, so they use bait and switch. And most fail anyway (to become a unicorn). However, even a CEO can care about it, its just that they ultimately fall under authority of the shareholders / board.

Right. Well I think that’s one of the reasons Musk doesn’t take Spacex public. The why he operates under is very much not palatable for any reasonable shareholder. Shareholders would want to scale out space deployments of practical things (satellites) and focus on that. If they knew Musk’s why, which is to get to Mars, well … well I mean that’s just crazy. What board is going to go for that?

He carefully keeps that one out of sight.

And I hope he continues to keep it private. Much as he has gone off the deep end lately, I have idolized him for so long I can’t help rooting for him.

I don’t disagree with what you’re trying to say, but keep in mind that SpaceX still has shareholders, and a board. It’s a much more limited and vetted set of investors, but very much not a closely-held corporation or anything like it.

Out of sight? He talks about it publicly and constantly (at lease he used to. Before Tesla and then Twitter started occupying more of his attention).

Shareholders can be told that they are aiming at Mars, full stop. As long as they don't control the voting and were told that before they bought the shares, it's fine.

Elon musk is a minority owner in SpaceX. He has profit-motivated shareholders too.

> a private owned company can care about it. Even successors.

In theory, but rarely in practice. I've seen a lot of private, family-owned businesses go out of business or get sold after the son/successor takes over because of exactly the phenomenon jesuscript mentions. Even if the successor cares, they don't care about the same things as the founder.

I think it is extremely unlikely that Jobs would have said well then we just shut down Apple if there is not a need for us anymore. From what I have read he was a business man first. He also very clearly had a very good sense of product quality and was good enough technically to understand not only what was possible, but what was going to be possible in 5 years. But that he was all about the users needs and not himself is not something I think the facts bear out.

Seems like everyone was treating the non-founder Jobs as being typical of a founder to me. If he had stayed at Apple instead of going off to do Next he would have been more typical and probably have still been bad at quality and focused on slimy sales tricks.

He's really more an example of someone who was forced to correct some pretty massive defects and lack of vision in important areas where most lottery winning founding CEOs will never get corrections.

I would be kind of curious but I found it very funny if he wasn't a black mark against Next hardware back then given that workstation users were already going to see consumer as cheap even if he didn't have a reputation for cheapening his line further.

Really I think his behavior was much more inline with Cook than his earlier self once he was successful and founder envy was more an external benefit than related to some actual behavior he had.

> The original creator of the company will care about that because they know why they are trying to solve the problem. Everyone that comes after will not.

A good follow up question is why not make CD Baby a non-profit instead of for-profit? Being a non-profit foundation would telegraph to everyone, including future leadership, where their priorities should lie.

A non-profit is largely motivated to stay alive, just like a for-profit, but mainly does it by asking for money from rich people rather than selling things.

Also, the extra accounting and regulation is intense for a small organization.

These have been getting popular recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation

Much of the wealth a non-profit generates can get lost on large salaries and expense accounts. A charity might have more rules and send a stronger signal.

But having said that the creator could make tons of money and then shut it down because it is not needed. That's perfectly logical

When someone mentions that I always talk about the credit union I worked for in college:

- first it was a non profit credit union that served a few local large companies.

- then it became a larger “regional credit union”

- then they said “fuck it we are a for profit bank”.

Every large organization seeks to increase its power. You see the sane thing in churches.

Sure, the smell of money in the air attracts the sharks who then slowly took over.

jobs talking about exactly that with regards to Xerox. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM

You don't hate to deify Jobs since you just made a completely unnecessary and off topic deification of him.

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