The WNBA media constantly demands that Caitlin Clark answer for internet trolls. They tell her she needs to condemn “racism, misogyny and homophobia,” even though she has nothing to do with the messages other players receive on social media.But does that standard change when the players facing online trolling are being attacked due to their proximity to a different WNBA star, one who receives very different treatment from those same commentators?ANGEL REESE, ATLANTA DREAM DISAPPOINTED AFTER WNBA FINALS GAME 7 LOSS: ‘WE’LL BE BACK’Atlanta Dream players Jordin Canada and Rhyne Howard are now on the receiving end. And the hate isn’t coming from supposed Caitlin Clark fans; it’s coming from supposed Angel Reese fans.Will the commentators who keep assigning Clark responsibility for other people’s behavior apply their standard to Reese?Don’t hold your breath.For the record, I don’t think either player owes anyone a statement. Neither Clark nor Reese is responsible for what other people do or say online. However, I do think the people who keep demanding condemnations from Clark owe us an explanation as to why they aren’t keeping up that energy when it’s Reese at the center.The list of WNBA media members who have openly called for Clark to denounce online hate, something Clark has done multiple times by the way, is almost too long to count. But let’s recap a few of the biggest ones:Those examples span from 2024 through this season. So, this isn’t new. These people have been making demands of Clark for three seasons, despite her repeated condemnations of the behavior.CAITLIN CLARK SAYS SHE BLOCKS SOCIAL MEDIA HATE AND ENJOYS HOSTILE WNBA ROAD CROWDSOn July 3, Clark once again delivered a lengthy statement condemning online hate. She explicitly extended that condemnation to the treatment of opponents, teammates and coaches.”The harassment, the hate, none of that is okay. … There should never be question of character. Like I’ve always stood up here and said that and that’s truly what I believe. That’s how I was raised. … none of that is okay. And I don’t want anybody to ever experience that,” Clark said.A reporter raised the subject again at her October 8 season-ending news conference. Asked about Kelsey Mitchell’s comments on the treatment she receives, Clark was also asked to address “the attention this team receives because of you, but maybe not attention that you necessarily asked for.”There’s that familiar framing again. Other people send the messages, but Clark gets asked to account for the attention surrounding her teammates.So she answered. Again.”As far as people that have used me to demonstrate racist rhetoric or hate or discrimination, that’s not something I stand for,” Clark said.The expectations come from commentators, the questions come from reporters, and Clark keeps giving them an answer.But apparently, that still wasn’t enough.On October 23, ESPN analyst Monica McNutt said: “There is no way that someone would use my likeness to support causes that I am against.”Clark has already told people she opposes that behavior. Repeatedly. How many more statements would satisfy McNutt?And now that people defending Angel Reese are attacking Reese’s own teammates, does McNutt expect the same response from her?My guess? Not a chance.Jordin Canada returned to social media after avoiding it during the playoffs and immediately found a reminder of why she had stayed away.”It blows my mind that as fans yall CHOOSE to say the hurtful and cruel things out loud and on here,” she wrote, describing the comments as “heartless, rude, insensitive.”Some of the posts targeting her and Howard make their allegiance clear. One account accused Howard, coach Karl Smesko and the Dream’s owners of selling Reese out in a supposedly rigged Finals. Another defended Reese while calling Canada and Howard “BOTH selfish players and human beings” and accusing them of not caring about winning. And some of the attacks were explicitly racist, including posts using the N-word.So where is the insistence that Reese address online trolls “invoking her name” as an excuse to attack other players? So far, the WNBA media has been silent.WNBA FINALS TEAMS END SEASON WITH ONE FINAL NATIONAL ANTHEM SNUB AS DREAM, VALKYRIES LEAVE COURTReese, meanwhile, outlined her plans for the next six months. In an Instagram post (on her private secondary account), Reese announced she is pausing her podcast for the offseason, plans occasional YouTube vlogs and will spend time resting and working out in Florida.Her explanation: “i’m dedicating this off season to myself.”Can you imagine Caitlin Clark announcing that she’s taking the next six months to focus on herself while her teammates are complaining about receiving nasty messages on social media? The WNBA media might never recover from such a scenario.We’d get days, probably weeks and maybe even months of lectures about leadership, accountability and whether Clark was abandoning the teammates receiving online abuse.Think pieces would be plastered all over The Guardian, The Athletic, ESPN and other left-wing sites explaining how White women have the privilege of focusing on themselves while Black women have no choice but to always worry about everyone else in their “community.”They would all demand that Caitlin Clark issue yet another statement. Then, they would complain that the statement wasn’t enough. The whole cycle would fuel the WNBA media ecosystem through the entire offseason.So, where are the lectures for Angel Reese? Anyone see any think pieces about how Reese is being selfish? Didn’t think so.All of this unfolds in a league that spends an extraordinary amount of time talking about what people (and bots) say on the internet.In August, after Sophie Cunningham’s comments about “biological men” competing in women’s sports sparked a debate over eligibility, WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert told teams an upcoming meeting of the league’s anti-hate task force would address whether males should be eligible to play in the WNBA.Yahoo Sports reported that meeting instead largely focused on online hate directed at players. Even with eligibility rules on the agenda, the WNBA couldn’t stop talking about internet trolls.USA SPORTS, NBC CLAIM RECORD WNBA FINALS RATINGS, BUT COMPARISONS LEAVE OUT IMPORTANT CONTEXTThat’s what I wanted to ask Engelbert about when I attended her October 17 press conference before Game 1 of the WNBA Finals. Why does online commentary warrant so much of the league’s time and attention? And does repeatedly highlighting negativity overshadow the positive things happening with attendance and television audiences?I wasn’t called on.Engelbert nevertheless returned to the subject in her final answer, condemning people who sit “behind a keyboard to spew vitriol and hate and racism and misogyny at our players.”After all those meetings, statements and lectures, you’d think the reporters, analysts and commentators demanding more from Caitlin Clark would recognize a familiar situation in Atlanta.THE CRAIG CARTON SHOW–UNFILTERED, UNAPOLOGETIC AND UNMISSABLE. DOWNLOAD HIS DAILY PODCAST NOW!Where are you, Elle Duncan, Monica McNutt, Sarah Spain, and Nancy Armour? Where are your demands for Angel Reese to defend her teammates?Again, I don’t think Reese owes anyone a statement. Clark doesn’t, either.But the people who have spent three seasons assigning that responsibility to Clark should explain why their standard apparently disappears when applying it would require them to make demands of Reese.In the WNBA media’s world, Caitlin Clark has to answer for the internet.But Angel Reese gets to focus on herself.
‘Grand Theft Auto’ community organizing ‘last ride’ on old game before release of ‘GTA VI,’ but why?
November is finally upon us, and aside from setting our clocks back an hour, that also means we are a little more than two weeks away from the release of “Grand Theft Auto VI.”The hotly anticipated title is set to drop on November 19, and the gaming community at large can hardly wait, which is understandable considering they’ve gone 13 years between installments.Yes, hard to believe that, as of September 17 of this year, “Grand Theft Auto V” would be old enough to see a PG-13 movie in theaters.UNKNOWN HACKER ALLEGEDLY LEAKS SEVERAL MINUTES OF GRAND THEFT AUTO VI GAMEPLAY AHEAD OF NETFLIX REVEALGiven the large time gap between games, you would expect there to be equal parts yearning for the new game as there is nostalgia for the old one, and from that nostalgia comes the “Last Ride.”The “Last Ride” was pitched by the GTA community, and will see thousands of players take one last lap around the map of Los Santos — the in-game world for “GTA V” based heavily on Los Angeles — the night before “GTA VI’s” big release.It’s been trending heavily on social media, with gaming outlets all over the world picking up on it.As a particularly nostalgic person myself as well as a fan of the “Grand Theft Auto” series, I can see where these guys and gals are coming from with the “Last Ride,” but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when you peel the layers back a bit.For starters, “GTA V” isn’t going anywhere.On November 20, you will still be able to pop the disc into your Xbox or Playstation and ride around Los Santos in your vehicle of choice to your heart’s content.Hell, I still play “GTA IV” about as much as I play its predecessor, and I doubt I’ll stop playing either once VI comes around.If you love the game that much, I guarantee you November 18 won’t be the last time you ever play “GTA V.”I appreciate the symbolism, but let’s not get melodramatic here.When “Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask” came out, do you think everyone just immediately chucked their copies of “Ocarina of Time” in the trash?NINTENDO OF AMERICA RELEASES TEASER TRAILER CONFIRMING LEGEND OF ZELDA: OCARINA OF TIME REMAKE IN 2026No, and as a matter of fact, the demand for “Ocarina of Time” has remained so high over the last 28 years that a remake is coming to the Nintendo Switch 2 later this month.This isn’t “Madden” or “FIFA,” where an updated version makes last year’s game immediately obsolete.”GTA V” is unique because of the world the developers created as well as the memories those who played the game created for themselves.I’m not here to yuck anyone’s yum; take the “Last Ride.”Enjoy it.Reminisce on all the good times you had these last 13 years, but let’s not act like “GTA V” is being relegated to the shelf for all of eternity come November 19.
NTSB finds ‘no evidence’ of Mar-a-Lago connection after Florida jet crash kills nine people
A critical piece of the private jet that plunged into a Florida neighborhood was found miles from the impact site, federal investigators revealed Tuesday as crews prepared to drain the crater left by the crash that killed nine people.Asked about the crash occurring less than 10 miles from President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and any potential connection to Secret Service operations, National Transportation Safety Board member Tom Chapman dismissed a link.”There is no evidence of connection. Purely coincidence,” he said.FORMER NFL STAR SAYS HE PREVIOUSLY FLEW ON PRIVATE JET THAT CRASHED IN FLORIDA: ‘ABSOLUTELY DEVASTATED’Most of the Learjet 60’s left elevator was recovered between 1.3 and 3.8 miles from the crash site in Palm Beach County, Chapman said during the agency’s final onsite briefing.The discovery adds to evidence that the aircraft began breaking apart before impact. The elevator is a movable surface on the aircraft’s tail that helps control whether its nose points up or down.TEXAS FAMILY OF 4, 20-YEAR-OLD COPILOT AMONG 9 KILLED IN FIERY FLORIDA JET CRASHBut Chapman said he did not believe the component would have enabled the aircraft to recover even if it had remained attached, given the speed of the jet’s descent.The Learjet was carrying seven passengers and two crew members from Austin, Texas, to North Eleuthera in the Bahamas when it crashed Sunday, killing everyone aboard.FAA SEEKS PERMANENT AIRSPACE RESTRICTIONS NEAR TRUMP’S MAR-A-LAGO AS EXPERT WARNS RULES ARE ‘NOT GOOD ENOUGH’Investigators are now preparing to remove water from the impact crater, where Chapman said they expect to recover additional aircraft components. Given the force of the crash, pieces buried there will likely be small.Severe weather has hampered some recovery efforts, and weather remains a key focus of the investigation. The cause of the crash has not been determined.FAA, NTSB INVESTIGATING POSSIBLE VIOLATION OF SAFETY PROTOCOL INVOLVING TRUMP, MARINE ONEInvestigators have also obtained dashcam footage to help reconstruct the aircraft’s final moments, Chapman said. Recovered wreckage is being retained for analysis, and officials urged anyone who encounters debris to leave it untouched and notify authorities.The crew had reported light clear ice and moderate turbulence while flying at about 35,000 feet before requesting permission to climb to 37,000 feet. Less than 30 seconds after controllers approved the request, the crew reported they were descending and issued a mayday call.Roughly 600 residents near Military Trail and Cresthaven Boulevard were evacuated after the crash, according to The Palm Beach Post.Between 40 and 50 people were staying at the Greenacres Community Center, Palm Beach County spokesperson John Jamason told the outlet. County officials were seeking state funding to help displaced residents with housing and transportation while authorities worked at the crash site.TRUMP HELICOPTER’S RADIO WARNINGS WENT UNHEARD BEFORE CLOSE CALL WITH PASSENGER JET, REPORT SAYSOfficials said during Tuesday’s briefing that Military Trail remained closed in both directions between 10th Avenue North and Purdy Lane. They did not provide a timeline for reopening the road or allowing displaced residents to return home.Among those killed were Austin technology entrepreneur Adam Robinson, 45, his wife, Helen Sharp, 40, and their children, Emma, 4, and Charlie, 2.NORAD FIGHTER JETS INTERCEPT 2 AIRCRAFT NEAR TRUMP’S GOLF CLUB, 3RD PLANE DELAYS HIS NJ DEPARTURERobinson, CEO and co-founder of Retention.com, had celebrated a business milestone in his final LinkedIn post the day of the crash, announcing that RB2B had reached $10 million in annual recurring revenue. He was also preparing for a live business debate scheduled for Tuesday.”Adam and Helen were devoted parents, and Emma, 4, and Charlie, 2, were the light of their lives. Helen and Adam were the love affair that will last forever,” the families said in a statement provided to Fox News Digital.”Their warmth, generosity and gift for making people feel welcome touched so many lives. Their loss will be felt deeply by all those who loved them and who they loved in return.”Chapman expressed confidence that investigators would determine what happened and thanked Florida and Palm Beach County authorities and first responders for their assistance.Officials added that further investigative updates will be posted on the NTSB’s website.Fox News Digital’s Greg Wehner contributed to this report.
BREAKING: Ninth Circuit Delivers MAJOR Election Day Win to Trump DOJ on Non-Citizen Voting
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday delivered an Election Day win to the Trump Justice Department on non-citizen voting.
On Monday night, a three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit Court briefly lifted its block on the Trump Administration’s efforts to separate and inspect suspected non-citizen ballots.
Hours later, the same appeals court reversed its ruling and sent the fight to the court’s entire slate of judges.
Fox News reported on Monday night’s decision by a three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit:
A federal appeals court briefly lifted a block on the Trump administration’s efforts to investigate alleged voting by noncitizens in California, then reversed course hours later, sending the dispute to the full 11-judge 9th Circuit for rehearing.
Earlier Monday night, a three-judge panel granted the Justice Department’s request to pause a temporary restraining order issued by a San Francisco federal judge. That order had barred the administration from making further requests to set aside ballots under the warning of prosecution of state and local election officials who declined.
The panel said the government was likely to prevail in arguing that its requests and criminal investigations were core executive functions.
Hours later, the full 9th Circuit vacated the ruling and ordered the case reheard by all 11 active judges, according to the court’s order. The move restored the district court’s restrictions while the full court considers the dispute.
On Tuesday, the Ninth Circuit Court’s entire slate of judges voted 6-5 (en banc) to reinstate its earlier ruling lifting the restrictions on the Trump DOJ’s efforts to separate non-citizen ballots.
This is the court’s third ruling in 12 hours.
The Trump Administration will now be able to ask state election officials to set aside suspect ballots.
BREAKING: In a 6-5 vote, the Ninth Circuit reinstated its earlier ruling lifting restrictions on the Trump administration’s efforts to have states set aside suspected noncitizen ballots, allowing it to resume such requests and warn election officials of prosecution. https://t.co/w6UFfDfHlP
— SCOTUS Wire (@scotus_wire) November 3, 2026
The post BREAKING: Ninth Circuit Delivers MAJOR Election Day Win to Trump DOJ on Non-Citizen Voting appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Watch Live: Leading Pollster John McLaughlan Gives Stunning Midterm Prediction: “It Just Depends on Trump Voters Getting Back Out to Avert This National Catastrophe” and More! The WAR Zone Podcast With Wayne Allyn Root Presented by The Gateway Pundit
CLICK HERE TO WATCH RIGHT NOW!
The Most Exciting, Intense, High-Energy MAGA/America First Podcast in the USA!
1 Hour Daily, Monday-Friday, 4:30 to 5:30 PM Eastern, 1:30 to 2:30 PM Pacific
The post Watch Live: Leading Pollster John McLaughlan Gives Stunning Midterm Prediction: “It Just Depends on Trump Voters Getting Back Out to Avert This National Catastrophe” and More! The WAR Zone Podcast With Wayne Allyn Root Presented by The Gateway Pundit appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Milwaukee Voting Machine Failed to Read Over 100 Ballots
Erik (HASH) Hersman from Orlando, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
A ballot scanner at a Milwaukee polling place failed to read at least 100 ballots early on Election Day, forcing election workers to divert the completed ballots into a locked auxiliary box until the problem was resolved.
Election workers later fed the ballots through the machine and counted them.
ALERT: A ballot machine in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, experienced an issue where at least 100 ballots were not read.
The issue was reportedly fixed, and the ballots were then counted.
Always confirm that your vote was counted! Every vote matters!
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) November 3, 2026
Local news crews and the Milwaukee Election Commission confirmed the incident at Saveland Park Pavilion on the city’s south side, and the Commission later reported a similar machine problem at Fire House #38.
The glitches arrived on the same day a detailed internal Milwaukee Election Commission manual circulated online that includes shared laptop login credentials, an ExpressVote access code, and step-by-step instructions for staff to correct voter records, register voters, cancel absentee ballots, and deactivate applications.
WISN 12 News reported that the Saveland Park Pavilion issue involved roughly 100 ballots the machine could not read, which were placed in a locked box.
By 10:22 a.m., the technical problem had reportedly been fixed, and station crews watched as the ballots were run through the scanner and added to the totals.
The Milwaukee Election Commission stated that every properly cast ballot remained accounted for.
Later in the day, the commission confirmed a separate voting machine problem at Fire House #38 that was resolved shortly before 11 a.m., with the machine back in operation and all ballots cast during the outage reportedly counted.
Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe addressed these problems during a morning briefing, explaining that when machines jam or encounter networking issues, polling places revert to accepting ballots in an auxiliary bin.
“Usually those are resolved very quickly, and as soon as it’s resolved, then any of the ballots that were stored in the locked auxiliary bin will be fed through the tabulator and added to the totals just like all of the other ballots,” Wolfe said.
.@WI_Elections Administrator Meagan Wolfe urged people to be patient for results tonight after the polls close.
She said clerks have to process nearly 800,000 absentee ballots statewide. https://t.co/dWnDIZTIbc
— Spectrum News 1 Wisconsin (@SpectrumNews1WI) November 3, 2026
The Milwaukee Election Commission also reported a clerical issue involving some ballots that lacked required voter ID numbers. Officials said they audited and processed those ballots after determining they belonged to eligible voters.
Separately, election observers and reporters noted an early issue at Milwaukee’s Central Count facility at the Italian Community Center, where one of the high-speed tabulators used for absentee ballots had an unsealed door.
Officials corrected the jammed seal, applied it, and generated a machine report showing zero ballots had been processed through that unit before the problem was discovered.
A Republican observer told Votebeat he was not concerned once the zero-ballot report was produced.
Milwaukee’s central count is off to a smooth start, besides a brief hiccup involving a tabulator that initially wasn’t sealed.
Officials noticed the issue, sealed the tabulator, and ran a zero report showing that no ballots had been run through the machine.
— Alexander Shur (@AlexanderShur) November 3, 2026
Milwaukee has faced repeated equipment and procedural problems in recent elections.
In the 2024 presidential election, improperly secured tabulator doors at Central Count forced officials to restart counting and re-run about 31,000 absentee ballots.
During the August 2026 primary, election workers mistakenly downloaded audit logs instead of results from five tabulators, delaying the city’s reporting by about an hour. The subsequent release of the machines’ audit logs reportedly showed no evidence that ballots were added, deleted, or altered during the gap.
Officials maintained throughout Election Day that contingency procedures protected the ballots and that all properly cast votes would be counted.
The post Milwaukee Voting Machine Failed to Read Over 100 Ballots appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Election Betting Odds: Democratic Sweep Tops 70% (Live Updates)
Betting odds suggest Republican hopes of holding onto power in Congress are dim ahead of polls closing.
S&P 500 is looking over the edge of a technical cliff — what happens if it falls off?
Falling below 7,500 would lead to a dramatic increase in selling pressure and volatility, a J.P. Morgan strategist says, and that could end in a full-blown correction
Why Founders Beat Professional Managers When Industries Change
Founders vs professional managers comes down to one question: who can run a company when the industry stops standing still? Marc Andreessen’s answer, built on James Burnham’s theory of the managerial class, is that interchangeable professional managers are good at protecting a stable machine but tend to freeze when the product or the market changes underneath them. That is why Andreessen Horowitz would rather teach a founder to manage at scale than ask a manager to become a founder.
The managerial-capitalism section of this Dwarkesh Patel interview with Marc Andreessen starts around the nine-minute mark, and the founders section around fifty minutes in. A shorter clip from a separate Andreessen interview, where he walks through the same Burnham frame with a SpaceX example, has been circulating on X. One note if you watch that clip: the captions say “James Byrne.” He is talking about James Burnham.
The Advice That Sounds Smart Until the Market Moves
I have heard the same sentence in green rooms, on podcast calls and over dinner with founders for more than a decade: “Hire great people and get out of their way.” It sounds mature.
And I have watched what happens when founders take it literally. The founder hires a polished operator with a beautiful resume, hands over the product roadmap, and steps back to “work on the business.” For a year, everything looks cleaner. Then the market shifts. A new tool shows up, a platform changes its rules, customers start wanting something different. And the polished operator does exactly what they were trained to do: protect the plan.
That is the moment the company stalls. Not because the manager is lazy or dumb, but because they were hired to run a machine, and the machine just became obsolete.
Here is the line I keep coming back to: a manager protects the machine you built; a founder notices when the machine is pointed at the wrong target. You need both. But only one of them can turn the ship.
Burnham’s Frame in Plain English: Bourgeois Capitalism vs Managerialism
James Burnham was an American political theorist who wrote The Managerial Revolution in 1941. That book is where his core argument lives: ownership and control of big organizations were splitting apart, and a new class of professional managers was taking control. Andreessen also often cites Burnham’s 1943 book The Machiavellians, which is about how elites actually hold power.
In the Dwarkesh interview, Andreessen lays out two kinds of capitalism.
Bourgeois capitalism is the old model. One person owns the business, runs the business and often puts their name on the door. Andreessen’s examples include Ford Motor Company, and Andreessen Horowitz itself. He describes it as the owner, builder and CEO being “one person with a direct link between ownership and control.”
Managerial capitalism is what replaced it across most of the economy. Ownership is spread across thousands or millions of shareholders who are not paying attention, so a professional managerial class steps in and runs the company. In Andreessen’s summary of Burnham, the managers end up in control even though they might own only a sliver of the company.
Here is the rough timeline, in plain English:
1880s to 1920s: Railroads, steel, oil and early auto companies grow too big and too complex for one owner to supervise. Layers of salaried managers appear to coordinate them.
Early 1900s: Business schools such as Harvard Business School and later Stanford’s business school turn management into a teachable, portable profession. The idea spreads that a well-trained manager can run almost anything.
1960s and 1970s: The conglomerate era pushes that idea to its extreme. If management is a universal skill, why not run a hotel chain, a bakery and a defense contractor under one roof?
Burnham’s argument was that this shift was inevitable because of scale and complexity. Andreessen agrees that big organizations do need people who can run things at scale. This is not an anti-manager rant.
Where Professional Managers Shine, and Where They Freeze
In the Dwarkesh conversation, Andreessen puts it bluntly: managers “don’t build new things.” They are not trained for it, and their incentives point the other way. If you are a manager, your number one job is “not to upset the applecart.” You want to keep the job, keep the comp and avoid introducing risk.
In the clip circulating on X, he sharpens the point. Managers may be good at running something that is “going to be status quo for a long time.” But “the minute things change,” he says, the manager personality type “doesn’t know how to deal with change.”
Think about it as two kinds of terrain:
Situation
Professional manager
Founder
Stable product, stable customers (a soup brand, a regional bank, a legacy car line)
Strong: optimizes cost, process and predictability
Can get bored, may over-tinker
New technology changes the product itself
Weak: defends the old plan and the old metrics
Strong: has the knowledge and authority to rip up assumptions
Company needs to run 1,000+ people
Strong: knows how to manage managers
Weak, unless they deliberately learn it
Long-term bet that hurts this year’s numbers
Weak: paid on quarterly and annual targets
Strong: the company is their life’s work
Look at that last row. Ben Horowitz made the same point back in 2010 in Why We Prefer Founding CEOs: professional CEOs are effective at maximizing a product cycle, while founding CEOs are better at finding the next one. His example: record-label executives who would not let go of their old business model when the internet arrived.
The SpaceX Example: What Good Are Management Skills Now?
Andreessen’s sharpest illustration in the clip is rockets.
For decades, orbital boosters were treated as expendable. You built an extraordinarily expensive machine, launched it, and most of it was gone. If you were a professionally trained manager at a launch company, your skill was running that system well: hitting schedules, managing contractors, controlling cost overruns.
Then, as Andreessen tells it, “this crazy guy in California comes up with this thing where the rockets land on their bottom and you can’t replicate it.” His question is the whole thesis in one line: “What good are your management skills at that point?”
The point is not “be like Elon.” It is structural. When the core assumption of an industry breaks, the person who is best at executing the old assumption is often the worst-positioned person in the building. Their expertise is in the thing that just stopped mattering.
This is where, in the clip, Andreessen says Burnham’s thesis “collapses.” Yes, there is a need to run things at scale. But managers “can’t adapt.” That is a stronger stance than his Dwarkesh-era framing, where he treated the drift toward managerialism as close to inevitable. The through-line in both: managers can run scale, but they will not build the next thing.
The a16z Operating Theory: Teach Founders to Manage at Scale
So if managers cannot adapt and founders cannot run 10,000 people, what do you do?
Andreessen’s answer, in the clip: “The founders can actually learn how to do this.” He frames it as a big part of how his firm thinks. Horowitz’s 2010 post says the same thing from the inside: teaching a founding CEO how to maximize the product cycle is easier than teaching a professional CEO how to find a new one.
In the Dwarkesh interview, Andreessen names the specific breakthrough a founder has to make: learning to manage managers. Even a CEO of a 100,000-person company only has eight to twelve direct reports. If you can lead a team of managers, that skill scales. He describes the best case as a founder-minded CEO “managing a team of managers who are doing all the managerial stuff required at scale.” Best of both worlds.
He also tells founders the honest part. In his estimate, nearly every founder they back is smart enough to run a big company, but maybe half have the temperament, and fewer still actually want to be doing it twenty years later. Horowitz is even more direct: almost no founder has the CEO skill set on day one, and learning it on the job is often “a miserable, debilitating experience.” He did it anyway, because it is the most reliable way to build something great.
That is the real choice in founders vs professional managers. It is not founder or manager. It is founder who learns to manage versus manager who tries to become a founder. The first one is hard. The second one rarely happens.
7 Things a Scaling Founder Can Do This Month
If you are a founder somewhere between ten and a few hundred people, here is how I would put this into practice. All of it requires you to stay in the building.
Learn to manage managers before you need to. Pick one leader who already has a team and coach them weekly. This is the skill Andreessen says separates founders who scale from founders who get replaced.
Keep your hands on product taste. Review the roadmap and sit in on at least one product or customer session every week. Delegating execution is smart. Delegating judgment about what to build is how founders lose the company.
Hire operators who amplify your judgment, not replace it. In interviews, ask candidates how they handled a time the strategy changed under them. You want someone who builds systems around a moving target, not someone who needs the target to hold still.
Run skip-level conversations. Once a month, talk directly with people two levels down. You will hear about market shifts weeks before they reach a slide deck.
Write down your company’s core assumptions. List the five beliefs your business model depends on. Once a quarter, ask your leadership team which one is most likely to break. This is the founder’s version of watching for the rocket that lands.
Protect your own capacity. Founders who burn out hand the company to the managerial class by default. Build a founder energy operating system so you can still think clearly at 200 people.
Delegate without disappearing. The opposite of micromanaging is not vanishing. Most founders struggle with the psychology of letting go, so they swing from doing everything to doing nothing. Hand off outcomes, keep the feedback loop.
Don’t confuse this with Paul Graham’s “Founder Mode.” Graham’s 2024 essay, sparked by Airbnb’s Brian Chesky, is about how founders should run their own companies day to day, including skip-level meetings, instead of following conventional delegation advice. It is related and worth reading. Andreessen’s Burnham frame is a bigger, economy-wide argument about who runs organizations and why professional managers stall when industries change.
The Bottom Line on Founders vs Professional Managers
Andreessen describes the economy as roughly 99% managerial, with venture capital trying to keep the other 1% alive so new things still get built.
Managers are not the enemy. The enemy is a company that forgets why it exists the moment the ground moves. If you are the founder, your job is not to hand the keys to someone with a better resume. Your job is to become the person who can drive the bigger vehicle, without losing the instinct that told you where to go in the first place.
The industries that matter most are the ones that are about to change. Make sure the person in charge can change with them.
FAQ
What is the difference between founders and professional managers?
Founders start companies and usually hold both ownership and control, so they can change direction fast. Professional managers are hired to run existing organizations, are often trained in business schools and are typically rewarded for predictable results rather than reinvention.
What did James Burnham mean by the managerial revolution?
In his 1941 book The Managerial Revolution, Burnham argued that ownership and control of large organizations were separating. Dispersed shareholders owned companies, but a new class of professional managers actually ran them, gaining real power without holding much ownership themselves.
Why does Marc Andreessen prefer founder-led companies?
Andreessen argues that managers are good at running things at scale but do not build new things and struggle when industries change. Founders, he says, can learn to manage at scale, which is easier than teaching managers to innovate.
Can founders learn to manage at scale?
Yes, but it takes deliberate work. Andreessen says the key breakthrough is learning to manage managers, because that skill scales. Ben Horowitz adds that almost no founder starts with CEO skills, so most learn them on the job, often painfully.
Is founders vs professional managers the same as Founder Mode?
No. Paul Graham’s Founder Mode essay is about how founders should operate inside their own companies. Andreessen’s Burnham frame is a broader argument about managerial capitalism and why professional managers tend to stall when an industry changes direction.
Disclaimer: This article is for educational purposes only and is not business, legal or investment advice. Quotes from Marc Andreessen are drawn from his public Dwarkesh Patel interview and a widely shared interview clip; summaries of James Burnham’s work are simplified for a general audience. Make leadership and hiring decisions with advisers who know your company.
The post Why Founders Beat Professional Managers When Industries Change appeared first on Addicted 2 Success.
Harold Ford: I’ll Be Damned If I’m Going To Watch Stevens Criticized For Standing On Principle
The leftist media trashing of Congresswoman Haley Stevens (D-MI) in the immediate aftermath of her Sunday endorsement of GOP Senate candidate Mike Rogers continued into Monday. But Monday afternoon on the Fox News Channel’s The Five, Democrat panelist Harold Ford Jr. bucked the trend, blaming El-Sayed for his feud with Stevens, and calling the attacks on her “out of bounds.”After reviewing the weekend’s events, Emily Compagno turned to the vile way in which Democrats in the media and beyond have been attacking Stevens, airing several clips to prove her point.
COMPAGNO: The knives are out for Stevens. Party leaders slamming the move as a betrayal with some even questioning her mental fitness.DAVID AXELROD CLIP: Haley Stevens is obviously struggling.DEBBIE DINGELL CLIP: I have been worried about her all last week.JAMES CARVILLE CLIP: You think that these Republicans are going to treat you as anything other than what they view you as, and that is, let me just break news to you, a used condom. Compagno then asked Dana Perino to weigh in, and she unsurprisingly ripped what she had just heard.PERINO: If you look at all that, to me, one of the things that Haley Stevens will realize is that the Democratic party is the most sexist party ever to exist. I go back to 1997, when the Monica Lewinsky thing happened and none of the women’s groups wanted to support that young woman….The first thing they have to say about her (Stevens) is she might be crazy, she’s so emotional….In the primary, she almost beat him, right?… So what happens in politics?…You try to say, okay, let’s hold hands now, tell me what you want me to learn, let’s be friends, let’s figure this out. And she tried and Abdul El-Sayed never did. He continued to attack her, he called her an idiot. They wouldn’t stop on all the anti-Semitic attacks….And they go straight back to the AIPAC thing. And what I can see in her is that she lost a lot of friends, but she’s gained and kept her self respect.Perino got in a closing shot before Compagno brought Ford in, and he first attempted to separate the Democrat party from the attacks on Stevens.
PERINO: But on this one it just proves that the Democrats have to go straight to sexism immediately and shun her.COMPAGNO: Harold, does this reveal that that is the true nature and the true colors of the Democrat party when the leaders call this a I betrayal and call her a used condom?FORD JR.: No. They’re wrong to do that but this is not the Democratic party. Democratic party is talking about issues that are resonating with voters and one of the reasons they’re ahead in a lot of the races according to the last week of polling….I would have handled this differently if I were her and him (El-Sayed).He then went on to blame El-Sayed for the bad blood between him and Stevens, and pushed back hard at those who have attacked the Congresswoman.FORD JR.: I blame him more, though, because he won the primary. And when you’re the winner, you don’t practice political malpractice by not reaching out to the person you beat….I don’t like David Axelrod and others piling on her in a mental health — I think that is so out of bounds. You don’t know this young lady, at least I don’t. I don’t think you do. I don’t mean to single out David. But anybody talking about her, Anderson Cooper and all of y’all, this young lady made a principled decision about a grievance she had with Mr. El-Sayed…. I’m not saying I agree with her but I’ll be damned if I’m going to watch someone criticize this young woman for standing on her principle….If you criticize her you ought to criticize El-Sayed as well because he was the winner by less than a percent and did not reach out to reconcile like he should of….If he loses this race it won’t be because of her. It will be because those in that camp didn’t reach out….So shame on both of them and shame on those who are criticizing and attacking this young lady’s health openly and in a real kind of subdued way as you try to support El-Sayed. Support El-Sayed, but don’t attack this young lady.Harold Ford Jr. isn’t hesitant to speak up when he disagrees with his conservative panel members on The Five, and as evidenced by Monday’s performance, the same is true when he is at odds with those in his party.