> how founders think

The fact you literally believe your method of thinking is any different than other employees is exactly why 90% of startups fail.

If we are talking “founders”, the two Creo founders made hundreds of millions of dollars when the company sold. Long before that though, they gave away a third of the company to a guy they named as second CEO. Then the original CEO biked around China for a year while that guy made him that fortune. The two founders pooled their shares and then split it three ways with the new guy ( second CEO ). Many rank-and-file employees made millions as well. It was a different set of folks.

I am not sure how many hundreds of millions you have made but their way seemed to work.

I've run many teams like this and have generally received good feedback from my teams. It's pretty simple in my experience. Don't punish people for making generally sound decisions that end in failure. Reward them for decisions that end in success. The issue is that managers need to eat some of the risk of those failures although it is offset by the benefit of the team's successes. Few managers are actually able to do this versus trying to dump all the risk somewhere else (usually onto their teams). But if you can maintain a management layer like that then it's amazing.

No problem. I am not sure what we are disagreeing about.

The company was amazing. No offense but it is not important to convince you of that. And you are certainly not going to convince me that my experience or the stories told by hundreds of others are false.

You could be trying to convince me that management does not matter, as my core claim is that it does. If that is what we are disagreeing about, I would like to know more. Great ideas can come from anywhere but I want to stay evidence driven. It is the only way I know how after working at Creo.

> And the acquiring company […]

The happy lovey-dovey kumbaya-chanting rainbow bunnies that made piles of cash (aka Creo) were the acquiring company. Not the other way around.

You keep explaining imagined features of an alternate reality where the people who worked there actually hated it.

This isn't an abstract thought exercise. You're talking to someone who worked there, so it comes across as irrelevant to imagine people who hated the politics.

I agree with you generally that abstractly one should discount claims of lack of politics. founder soul, founder, sold it, Google for 7 years, then founding again.