Did I miss something about "founder mode"?

I think I'm really confused why Paul Graham's recent "Founder Mode" essay (https://paulgraham.com/foundermode.html) is getting so much play. It's not wrong at all (it articulates a great point), but I feel like we've figured out what "founder mode" actually is already...?

What he describes as founder mode is pretty much exactly what Steve Jobs was describing in his famous 1995 interview segment on "product people" (video and transcript: https://sameerbajaj.com/jobs/). A lot of people watch that video and hear "product good, sales bad," but that's missing the point. He's getting at something much deeper, and it's pretty obvious he understood it well but didn't articulate it explicitly here.

The "founder mode" folks or "product people" that succeed in these roles are individuals who do two things: they identify and understand the inherent complexity of a business's DNA and they take active ownership of stewarding the execution to solve it. They understand and can lead through the complexity of making the product work, and they personally own making sure that leadership happens whoever is doing it. Why was Steve Jobs so effective at what he did? He understood what made Apple products great, and he personally owned making sure those attributes stayed as the central focus of the company (and did it again when he came back). Why are startup CEOs in "founder mode" able to do what they do? Because they understand the complex DNA of a company's product and personally own making sure decisions operate within that.

Why did GitHub become so dominant? Because Chris along with Tom, PJ, and Scott were relentless in their understanding of what GitHub was meant to do and were very personally involved in making sure that stayed the focus. Why is Figma such a successful product? Same thing. It doesn't mean only founders can do it, but the decisions about hiring and decisionmaking going forward have to match the same "mode" of thinking. You can list a ton of companies who followed this "founder mode" of leadership even as they scaled and see why that produced a great product. Likewise, you can just as easily see when many of them started slipping into the lackadaisical mode they're in today and why. Need examples? Look at Google or Facebook, or you can go even further back and examine companies like Boeing or Xerox. What's the factor here that caused them to become what they are today?

It's when that "founder mode" champion/product person and people like them take their hands off the wheel (or they're forced off the wheel) that things start going awry. It's when they either leave without a "founder mode" replacement or they start delegating all decision making to folks who aren't engaged on the same level. Reading that PG essay was really interesting since I think "hire good people and give them room to do good work" is exactly how you build and run a larger team, but if you aren't hiring "good" people, it doesn't matter how much you're involved or room you give, you're going to slide into "management mode" (or worse). At least where "good" in this context means people who understand the company DNA and are going to actively shepherd it. Of course when you're a product-led company and the new leadership only understands sales numbers, it's going to go weird. Of course if you're a product company and you hire a sales leader who only understands services and doesn't care about making good products necessarily things are going to be a bad fit. Of course it'll feel like being gaslit if you've hired people who are obviously not doing the thing you hired them for, but they say they can do the thing, are supposedly doing the thing, and say they're doing said thing currently. When that assessment is echoed by trusted outside influences who tell you that's just how it's supposed to work, then yeah I get the feeling. But it shouldn't be surprising since in any scenario, if the people you've hired don't have the same posture of ownership, commitment to shephering the DNA of the product, and I would add an understanding of what makes the product DNA essential to the success of the company, then yeah the same things will not happen that did when the leadership who make the decisions embodied those attributes. You can scale "founder mode" out, but it has to be the right people with the right mix of personal ownership, understanding of the company's DNA, and commitment to making sure those things work together for the success of the product.

The real problem is that you have to have all three of those pieces for it to work at maximum effect, and it's almost impossible to know if someone is going to have that from the outside. I realize it's incredibly hard to hire for that, so I don't mean to imply that it's not. But that's why early hires (and when they're not early, hires that are less than a few degrees of separation from the top) are vital to spend time on. And in my experience, they almost always have better results when they're steeped within and developed in the same DNA that you want to replicate.

Often times CEOs and boards outside hire a sales leader who has a commitment to making sure the company produces great work and has an understanding of the market, but they don't personally own the success of the other two parts. They might hire a technical leader who has a great understanding of the company's problems and product and is intense in their personal ownership of solving them, but they don't understand what they're actually committing to serve (i.e., the product serving its customers vs. solving tech problems). They might hire a marketing leader who has great personal investment in the success of the company's products and a commitment to seeing the vision succeed, but their understanding of the company's DNA isn't quite right so things start wandering. It's not necessarily anyone's fault because usually the things that you want to hire for on paper look good for these folks. But the closer the hire is to point zero (i.e., whether in company age or in the org chart), the more vital it is to hire folks who embody all of these things and will own them if you want to actually scale this "founder mode" beyond the one person.

Did I miss something in that essay? Am I just spewing things people already know, and I missed some insight here that makes it "instantly influential"?