You do need to hire great people and give them room - but that doesn't mean you ignore them and let them operate their business unit like a separate organization... You need to be involved as a CEO or other key decision maker.
This philosophy of involvement follows through the entire org structure not just from CEO to the farthest position down the org tree.
Let's not let this be a rug to sweep poorly-behaving founders behavior's under, as there are plenty of those out there (key: successful founders).
If you want to scale out, you need to have other be responsible for chunks of the operation. And they won't be responsible unless they have autonomy. This doesn't mean 100% free reign, but it does mean giving up a certain amount of control.
"trust but verify" goes a long way here, and simple management techniques like goal set and review (OKRs, etc) address the "professional fakers" issue - ironically one of the first things you should learn in formal management.
As a founder and later a C suite exec - you really can't make this black and white. As a founder there is no greater feeling than hiring someone and finding out they can do a subset (ideally a large subset) of your tasks better and more efficiently than you. What you can not/should not do is walk away from that area of the business and never look back. You should still be invested and collaborative. A creative founder that can think from first principles should be able to contribute positively to any level of initiative even when they are not the most experienced person in the room. They should also be able to convey why an idea should buck convention and understand the consequences of it from the domain experts they hired.
The brain tells the finger what to do (press 'r' to reply to email).
But the brain does not walk down and presses the 'r' key itself, that would make the finger redundant, and it would be a distraction for the brain. The brain also doesn't talk to the finger and tell it how to move to the 'r' key step by step, as that would be micro-management and piss the finger off.
What the brain needs to do is to enthuse the finger so that the finger acts in a way the brain would have acted - the "finger as the extended brain".
Now a good leader can manage to enthuse not just one finger, but 20 "fingers" - and all their transitive reports. (No wonder successful biz leaders are similar to cult/sect gurus that can seem to distort reality.)
>Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it's described that way, doesn't it? Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.
Not to be that guy but if you're hiring fakers than you're not hiring good people to do their jobs.
The reason why you can't hire good people is because they don't care about money, and from what I've seen bringing money into the equation actively drives them away.
This is not something that a company like YC wants to hear because it means that their whole raison d'etre is flawed. I'm willing to bet that if the Paul Graham who wrote On Lisp met the Paul Graham who wrote this article, he would have some pointed questions about what went so spectacularly wrong in his career that he sold out so completely.
God knows that the me from 10 years ago would have similar questions and he'd be deeply unhappy about the answers.
This philosophy of involvement follows through the entire org structure not just from CEO to the farthest position down the org tree.
Let's not let this be a rug to sweep poorly-behaving founders behavior's under, as there are plenty of those out there (key: successful founders).