Professional Fakers and Gaslighting

Why does the good-sounding advice fail? Partly because some fraction of the polished executives you hire are, in PG's phrase, professional fakers: people skilled at managing up, saying the right things, and looking like leaders while the substance rots underneath. Founders, whose skill is building rather than evaluating career operators, are unusually easy for them to fool.

PG says founders were effectively gaslit from both directions: by the advisors, VCs, and journalists telling them to run the company like managers, and by the very people they hired when they followed that advice. When the founder sensed something was off and got involved, they were told they were micromanaging.

The founders who resisted, like Jobs and Chesky, were treated as eccentric outliers. The essay's bet is that they weren't exceptions, they were doing it right.