2 main differences:

1) your customer's requirements are pure (usually) - "please add a frammel button so I can manage my widgets better". Your boss's requirements are less so - "please satisfy corporate by attending this compliance training".

2) you can fire any customers who you don't like. Not so your boss.

I know what you mean, but I think there's an alternate way to look at this.

Every time I've moved jobs, I really look at it as firing my boss. The process is pretty much the same as firing someone:

* First, I voiced my concerns and gave my boss a chance to improve.

* When he wasn't improving, I began searching the job market to find his replacement (my future boss).

* After a few interviews, I found a replacement that was a really good fit for the role of "my boss".

* I let my old boss know that his performance had not improved enough, and I was forced to let him go, but I wished him all the best in his future endeavors.

* I gave my new boss a start date, and so far everything is going great.

Compliance training is about legal requirement. A little extrapolation suggests it is going to be things that your bosses are only asking you to consider because they are legally mandated. If they were going to be considerations anyway, why mandate them?

A lot of stupid things businesses do are to satisfy legal requirements that the business thinks is stupid. That one isn't the boss, it is the government.

That's the thing -- oftentimes your Boss thinks that X is a "legal requirement". When really it's "so-and-so is bugging me to cram this down your throats saying something about 'legal' and I'm too busy to even bother googling to find out whether it's really so. Plus even if I did some basic research I might have to actually think about it for a minute or two - and you know how much I hate that. So to save myself time, I think I'll just cram it down your throats."

My favorite X in this category: drug testing. (Contrary to popular belief, it's almost never an actual legal requirement - even if your company is getting state or federal funds.)

Remember that solo founders are widely encouraged to incorporate in Delaware just because it's the least legal risk. One state! Out of fifty, and several non-state entities! There's no legal requirement, and you can absolutely incorporate in your home state or many other places, but the advice is that if you want to focus on what your business does best, don't spend time thinking about any states' corporate law other than Delaware's, which is well-explored. If that's the bar, basically all other forms of compliance are well above it.

I get that good hackers have an instinct to ask "Why?" or "Really?" at every step and to understand the whole system, and I have it too, but one thing I've learned with experience is you need to train yourself to put a stopping point on "Why?" if you want to get anything done at your current level of descent. You absolutely can go arbitrarily deep, nobody is goin to stop you, and there are all sorts of fences that have no reason for existing, but you have a limited amount of time to do whatever work you want to do and show results. Do you want to build the next great social network, or the next great form of corporate structure? You can absolutely do either - you can't do both.

(One caveat: there are a few things that are legal requirements or near enough thereto that only apply when you have more than a few employees. If you're a solo founder, you presumably can't create a hostile work environment for yourself, for instance. However, if you're a solo founder pursuing B2B deals and having meetings with companies, it might be worth being aware of what sorts of things your target companies consider hostile work environments and would cause them to not invite you back for the sake of their legal risk - and that's even more about the standard corporate view of the law than the law itself. So, you may not be able to get away ignoring these conventions even as a solo founder, after all.)

Despite 400+ opinions, the pull on the team is one way: client needs.

My previous Companies has outside money, board, etc. That's three directions of pull.

We've saved a lot of time that way on investor management but our growth was limited by cash-on-hand.

Not-Compatoble request is a bit harder. But, with like 10+ prior years in consultant I'm generally able to direct thing to a multiple compatible solution.

Lots of research and customer development play for that.

Was there a concrete point at which you and your co-founder agreed to accept a minority stake and therefore give up absolute control? Was it a hard call to make or, already then, a relief because of the employee accountability?

The board of directors is legally responsible for running the company, in practice through major company decisions and scrutiny, so you can take some relief from that if you're a CxO doing what you think best "day to day" but not entirely sure you really know by yourself. Your board will get the legal blame if it goes seriously wrong and you've kept them sufficiently informed and involved in key decisions.

But you can still have a majority ownership stake while appointing a board. In doing so, you keep ultimate control (as shareholders) but you won't often exercise it.

Having ultimate control might change the social dynamics, but shareholders are not responsible for the company, the board of directors is and they should know it. Shareholders have the power to pass resolutions which effectively override directors, but most of the time they don't. Even if they do, it's up to the directors to figure out how to do what the shareholders want in a responsible and defensible way.

Anyone comparing a customer to a boss has had the luxury of never having a terrible boss.

Rentiers are an exception.

A fascinating alternative has been proposed by Yanis Varoufakis in which financial markets are eliminated, but labor and commodity markets remain: i.e. you can only own a single (variable value, single vote) share in 1 company at a time (usually a company you own are employed at); that share is tied to you as a person like a library card (you can't give it to someone else). Essentially all enterprises become cooperatively owned by the people who WORK for the enterprise. People have accounts with the Central Bank of their nation, etc... This stuff is pretty straightforward to do since banking is almost entirely automatable now.

But that's far too egalitarian to catch on with the current state of affairs. :-)

Companies survive because they don't die. That seems trite, I know. The consequences of it are important, as the equation is one where no matter how well you do, avoiding death is what matters.

SHL at Gumroad is a great example. SHL was encouraged to quit by the VCs when Gumroad was not a clear unicorn[1]. SHL chose not to let Gumroad die, and Gumroad lives.

The problem with all the ideas like the one Yanis Varoufakis proposes, is that they will almost certainly do well in good times, but companies survive because they don't die, and any system like the one you mention will lead to more dead companies.

That's a big claim I know, but imagine a situation where a company has 20 people - 4 sales and 8 support (secretaries, returns, admin) in the office and 8 people who work in fulfillment - a warehouse and lets say deliveries. Times get tough, and they are forced to have a vote on who needs to be sacked - how do they vote? 12 of the 20 work together, do you really think they will vote to have their friends in the office sacked?

And would they even get to that point? Why would anyone ever vote to lose their job? And what about pay rises? How do you negotiate pay rises when everyone votes? In a multi-division company, lets say 3 divisions, would everyone vote to take a lower pay than people in a more productive division? Would hiring be run along profitability lines, with one division growing large, or prestige/some other political goal like maintaining voting block power?

Capital has clearly aligned goals that round to "don't die". Capital will be assigned in productive areas, pay rates will be higher in more valuable divisions (AWS vs Amazon Warehouse workers) and kill off products that aren't working (See Google).

At the meta, system level, there is also alignment. Capital can be reassigned to different companies, aligning the individual players with the system overall. That is why Blackberry was valued below its cash on hand at one point - capital was reassigned as Blackberry was more likely to blow through the cash than grow. A system where shares can not be reassigned has no system level optimisation which saves the system, even as individual companies die.

The same is not self evidently obvious or clear in collectivist systems, and always needs a series of extra steps to overcome self interest to be possible, none of which are convincing over longer timeframes.

Any collectivist system would only need a very small bias towards something other than optimising profitability to have long term terrible consequences. Homo Sapiens had a tiny advantage over Neanderthals and other Hominids, and we are here and they are not. The casino advantage in most games is < 3% and think how much money they make.

Collectivist business ideas will have all the same problems of politics, combined with the ability to die completely, which Governments do not suffer outside of war, as they have a taxation monopoly.

[1] https://sahillavingia.com/reflecting - "Some of my investors wanted me to shut down the business. They tried to convince me that my time was worth more than trying to keep a small business like Gumroad afloat, and I should try to build another billion-dollar company armed with all of my learnings — and their money."

It’s also interesting you think capitalism allocates capital effectively. I would argue the opposite, that it aims to concentrate wealth into the hands of the few. How many life saving startups die while Apple has hundreds of billions of dollars of cash? How many brilliant people are born into poverty and can’t enact their ideas, while Bezos buys his sixth house?

- Investors don't have a boss.

- A founder/CEO who owns 100% of a private company doesn't have a boss. But (s)he is putting up with very high risk, betting on self, and living with the consequences.

It’s a feature. Cycles get rid of hierarchies and individual corruption.

Hunter-gatherers have patterns we can also describe as hierarchical as well, but it's meaningfully different.

Given the cultural, and possibly even genetic, coevolution of this strategy, bosses are going to be 'sticky'.

The boss ultimately dictates how this is to be done. Businesses fire customers, pivot the business to seek better ones, abuse/shortchange/swindle their customers all the time.

There are Bureaus of Consumer Protection, but no Bureaus of Boss Protection.

When you seek product-market fit, or decide which features to prioritize for development, you are in effect seeking to satisfy this boss. When you make pricing decisions, you’re likewise being guided by the constraints of your target customer base. The customer can ultimately shut you down, firing everyone, to stretch the metaphor. Can you fire the customer? Sure. But you always need a customer of some kind, and as a going concern you ultimately serve at the pleasure of that (aggregate) customer, and not the reverse.

This is one of the many points Kaczynski makes in his argument that “the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” The complete lack of true autonomy seems inherent to the system.

Money abstracts this away, but if you achieve “financial independence”, that just means you have accumulated enough wealth tokens that you can indefinitely have enough to exchange for things that someone actually had to go make. You’re “autonomous” in the sense that you’re utterly dependent on an entire society that agrees with the practice of doing work in exchange for fiat currency. But the Pharoahs were also utterly dependent on a society that agreed with the practice of doing work because if you didn’t, the pharoah’s bureaucrats wouldn’t keep your land irrigated and you would starve to death.

But autonomy as a person who actually does work is another thing entirely. Industrialization introduced time clocks, shift work, Taylorism, and all kinds of stuff that eroded that autonomy.

Actually, yes I do. It depends on which hunter gatherer society, but there is some indication from Sumerian scripts that before statecraft came a laisser-faire world, where people did not need to respond to a higher power, because one could always choose to bugger off to somewhere else.

It only works of course when there is excess food compared to the amount of humans, which is not a stationary situation as humans multiply to fill that gap.

CEOs only answer to shareholders insofar as they're expected to deliver a profit, which is actually very easy to do because most business "profit" is actually rent-seeking derived from resources (including intangibles) the business already owns. You have to be incredibly hubristic to fail as a corporate CEO. It's an easy job.

That's not true for small companies. Startups are harder, and startup CEOs are basically middle management within the "hive company" of venture capital. The true executives are the VCs who float from project to project, careers and fates diversified, and can peel their names off anything that looks like it's going to fail.

In big companies, though, most CEOs would do better not to show up, except once a quarter to give a speech or something. All they do is fire people, producing churn, and get in the way of the people who do the actual work. They can only fail if their egos get the better of them and they get so hubristic that they break something that used to be working. The same is mostly true of executives in general, although they have a little more vulnerability insofar as (a) if their bosses screw up, they may end up eating blame, and (b) if the CEO screws up so bad he himself gets fired, they'll probably also be replaced during the regime change.

It makes you wonder how important those big wigs really are. In my current company (a big bank), from what I'm seeing the execs are so far removed from reality by layers and layers of middle-managers who distort and manipulate facts to their favor when reporting upwards, that what the execs think they're managing is really some kind of alternative-universe avatar of the bank. Essentially they're operating in a Matrix created for them by their army of underlings.

The one about electric companies colluding, where the execs kept telling their subordinates not to collude with competitors, while said subordinates thought it was some sort of inside joke and just kept doing it.

Funniest part is, the execs apparently did not know, while their subordinates thought they were "clearly" communicating they were.

The morale, to me, was that management, at any scale or level, really only has as much power as their subordinates let them have.

And that implicit meanings, in communication, are absolutely and deeply unreliable.

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=11408

CEOs may not be smart in the IQ sense we nerds tend to worship, but they understand leverage and positioning, and they understand how to hack complex human systems for personal benefit, because it's what they did to get their careers in the first place.