The founder has a complete vision for the community/meetup/company/etc. They were able to design a thing that (as long as they continue putting in energy) is engaging, and they instinctively know how to change it so that it continues being great for participants.
The first successor has an incomplete, operational/keep-things-running-the-way-they-were type vision. They cargo-cult whatever the founder was doing. They don’t have enough vision to understand the ‘why’ behind all the decisions. But putting your finger on their precise blind spot is quite hard. It’s their “fault” (to the extent that we can blame anyone) that things go off the rails, but their bad decision-making doesn’t actually have short term impacts that anyone can see. Instead, the impacts come all at once, once they disappear, and there becomes common knowledge that it was a house of cards the whole time.
(or something. my models are fairly imprecise on this.)
Anyway, why did the founder get fooled into anointing the first successor even though they don’t have the skills to continue the thing? My guess is that there’s a fairly strong selection effect for founders combined with “market fit”—founders who fail to reach this resonant frequency don’t pick successors, they just fail. Whatever made them great at building this particular community doesn’t translate into skills at picking a successor, and that resonance may not happen to exist in any other person. Another founder-quality person would not necessarily have resonated with the existing community’s frequency, so there could also be an anti-selection effect there.
My model differs from yours. In my view, the first successor isn’t the source of most problems. The first successor usually has enough interaction and knowledge transfer from the founder, that they are able to keep things working more-or-less perfectly fine during their tenure, but they aren’t able to innovate and create substantial new value, since they lack the creativity and vision of the founder. In your terms, they are cargo-culting, but they are able to cargo-cult sufficiently well to keep the organization running smoothly; but when the second (and nth) successor comes in, they haven’t interacted much directly with the original founder, but instead are basing their decisions based, at most, on a vague notion of what the founder was like (though are often better served when they don’t even try to follow in the footsteps of the founder), and so are unable to keep things working according to the original vision. They are cargo-culting a cargo-cult, which isn’t enough to keep things working the way they need to work, at which point the organization stops being worth keeping around.
During the reign of the founder, the slope of the value created over time is positive, during the reign of the first successor, the slope is approximately zero, but once the second successor and beyond take over, the slope will be negative.
I’m not Ray, but I’ll take a stab --
The founder has a complete vision for the community/meetup/company/etc. They were able to design a thing that (as long as they continue putting in energy) is engaging, and they instinctively know how to change it so that it continues being great for participants.
The first successor has an incomplete, operational/keep-things-running-the-way-they-were type vision. They cargo-cult whatever the founder was doing. They don’t have enough vision to understand the ‘why’ behind all the decisions. But putting your finger on their precise blind spot is quite hard. It’s their “fault” (to the extent that we can blame anyone) that things go off the rails, but their bad decision-making doesn’t actually have short term impacts that anyone can see. Instead, the impacts come all at once, once they disappear, and there becomes common knowledge that it was a house of cards the whole time.
(or something. my models are fairly imprecise on this.)
Anyway, why did the founder get fooled into anointing the first successor even though they don’t have the skills to continue the thing? My guess is that there’s a fairly strong selection effect for founders combined with “market fit”—founders who fail to reach this resonant frequency don’t pick successors, they just fail. Whatever made them great at building this particular community doesn’t translate into skills at picking a successor, and that resonance may not happen to exist in any other person. Another founder-quality person would not necessarily have resonated with the existing community’s frequency, so there could also be an anti-selection effect there.
My model differs from yours. In my view, the first successor isn’t the source of most problems. The first successor usually has enough interaction and knowledge transfer from the founder, that they are able to keep things working more-or-less perfectly fine during their tenure, but they aren’t able to innovate and create substantial new value, since they lack the creativity and vision of the founder. In your terms, they are cargo-culting, but they are able to cargo-cult sufficiently well to keep the organization running smoothly; but when the second (and nth) successor comes in, they haven’t interacted much directly with the original founder, but instead are basing their decisions based, at most, on a vague notion of what the founder was like (though are often better served when they don’t even try to follow in the footsteps of the founder), and so are unable to keep things working according to the original vision. They are cargo-culting a cargo-cult, which isn’t enough to keep things working the way they need to work, at which point the organization stops being worth keeping around.
During the reign of the founder, the slope of the value created over time is positive, during the reign of the first successor, the slope is approximately zero, but once the second successor and beyond take over, the slope will be negative.