What Founders Delete When They Rewrite the Playbook

Joseph de Maistre’s Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions, written in the early nineteenth century and later translated from the 1847 Boston edition preserved by the Library of Congress, argues that the deepest rules of a polity exist before they are written.

In his formulation, written constitutional law does not create those rules from nothing. It develops or ratifies practices that already command obedience.

That argument was directed at the constitutional politics of his time, but it also offers a precise warning to startup founders. Companies regularly announce that they will replace management layers, abandon standard financing terms, or redesign internal execution from first principles.

The appeal is obvious. Standard practices often look inherited, cluttered, and only partly understood.

De Maistre’s objection is not that inherited arrangements are always good. It is that visible defects do not by themselves show that a structure can be safely rebuilt on a blank slate.

He presents the stronger claim that the most fundamental parts of a constitution are often unwritten.

Against the blank-slate instinct

The essay is best known for its attack on a priori constitutional design. De Maistre argues that political order is not usually built by abstract reasoning and then imposed on society.

Instead, institutions acquire authority through habit, memory, and repeated use. Written law arrives later, if at all, and works best when it reflects arrangements that people already treat as legitimate.

His examples are historical and polemical. He contrasts the instability of revolutionary constitutional experiments with the endurance of systems that left major matters undescribed or only partly codified.

In the 1847 translation, the core thesis appears in compressed form: fundamental constitutional principles precede written law, and what is most truly constitutional may not be safely written down.

For a founder, that is less a defense of old forms than a warning about hidden functions. A board structure, a vesting schedule, or a reporting line may survive not because it is elegant, but because it reduces a recurring category of failure.

If the founder sees only the burden and not the failure mode, reform becomes guesswork. This is why the language of "rewriting the playbook" deserves scrutiny.

Playbooks in venture-backed companies are not purely theoretical documents. They are compressed records of prior mistakes, bargaining outcomes, legal disputes, and personnel breakdowns. Even when a convention is imperfect, it may still contain institutional memory that a cleaner design omits.

What startup operations often forget

The operational case is clearest when companies try to eliminate hierarchy altogether. Holacracy, a management system that replaces traditional bosses and job titles with defined roles and circles, was adopted at Zappos after the company began moving in that direction in 2013.

The system was meant to reduce bottlenecks and distribute authority more widely.

As Fortune reported in 2016, Tony Hsieh later circulated a 4,300-word memo titled “Reinventing Zappos: The Road to Teal.” It stated that as of 4/30/15 there would effectively be no more people managers in order to eliminate the legacy management hierarchy.

The same report said that 18% of Zappos’ 1,500 employees took buyouts and another 11% left without a package. Survey scores fell on 48 of 58 questions and the company dropped off Fortune’s Best Companies list for the first time in eight years.

That episode does not prove that hierarchy is always superior. It does show the cost of replacing an existing operating system before the substitute has accumulated its own stable norms.

Once formal managers disappear, informal authority does not disappear with them. It shifts into less visible channels, where accountability may become harder to locate. This is close to the institutional problem de Maistre described.

A structure can survive with fewer written rules only when participants share enough custom to interpret ambiguous situations in consistent ways. A startup that removes hierarchy without that shared base may not become freer. It may become less legible to its own employees.

The same pattern appears in smaller forms. Founders often dislike quarterly reviews, compensation bands, role definitions, or approval thresholds because these tools can feel slow and impersonal. But many such tools exist because fast-growing teams eventually need repeatable ways to allocate authority, settle disputes, and compare performance.

Removing them does not remove the underlying problem.

Funding terms as accumulated memory

The warning also applies to venture financing. Founders encountering standard instruments for the first time often read them as arbitrary demands by incumbents. Board seats constrain discretion. Information rights require disclosure. Vesting cliffs can look paternalistic.

Preferred stock terms can appear one-sided when viewed only at the moment of negotiation.

Some skepticism is justified. Market standards are shaped by bargaining power, not by philosophical neutrality. But that does not mean every standard is expendable. Many terms persist because they solve predictable coordination problems between founders, employees, and investors over time.

This is especially true when companies underperform or personnel change.

The history of the SAFE is useful here because it shows what successful innovation in startup finance usually looks like. In a 2013 post at Y Combinator, Paul Graham wrote that YC partner and lawyer Carolynn Levy had created the SAFE as an alternative to convertible notes.

This came after YC had already advised funded startups in 2010 to use convertible notes and had helped standardize those documents. The sequence matters.

The SAFE did not arise from a rejection of venture financing as such. It simplified a financing path that founders and investors were already using. That is much closer to de Maistre’s theory of institutional development than to a blank-slate redesign.

A durable change often formalizes an established pattern, removes friction from it, and preserves the broader incentives that made the old pattern workable. By contrast, founders who attempt to replace mainstream financing entirely with bespoke structures may discover that they have also discarded the protections and expectations that make later rounds possible.

Consider vesting. It is easy to attack in theory because it delays full ownership. In practice, it also protects a young company from locking in a large permanent stake for a co-founder or early employee who leaves before the business is built.

The point is not that every vesting schedule is fair in every case. It is that the schedule is a response to a recurring and expensive problem.

What reform should actually look like

De Maistre did not deny that institutions change. He argued instead that true institution-building is rare and that most people overestimate their ability to start from zero. For founders, the practical lesson is not ideological conservatism. It is procedural humility.

That humility begins with diagnosis. Before changing a standard practice, a founder should ask what failure it was designed to prevent, what incentives it aligns, and what informal norms currently make it work.

If those answers are unknown, the case for abolishing the practice is weaker than it first appears. It also means distinguishing between simplification and invention.

Simplification reduces friction in an arrangement that people already understand. Invention asks participants to adopt a new theory of authority, risk, or ownership. The first often succeeds because it works with existing habits.

The second fails more often because it assumes a depth of coordination that has not yet been earned.

Founders usually do need to modify inherited playbooks. A seed-stage company cannot import the operating cadence of a public corporation, and a novel market may require unusual incentives. But revisions are safer when they proceed from the existing structure outward.

The strongest changes tend to preserve the function of a norm while changing its form.

That is also why complete legibility is not always the goal. Teams run on trust, default assumptions, and informal authority that do not fit cleanly into a process manual. Writing more rules can help at times, but it can also create the illusion that the rules themselves are the institution.

De Maistre’s sharper point is that the institution often lives in what the rules presuppose.

An earlier Beige Media article made a related case for incremental design in technology and governance. De Maistre provides the older and more severe version of that argument.

The founder who wants to change the playbook should first learn why it became a playbook at all.

That leaves a narrower but more durable standard for reform. Keep the burden of proof on the person proposing the redesign. Ask whether the proposed replacement has already emerged in practice somewhere, whether its incentives are legible to future investors and employees, and whether it solves a known problem without erasing embedded protections.

The Builder's Blind Spot

Startups like to describe themselves as builders of the new. De Maistre’s warning is that institutions are not built in the same way products are built. They usually grow by retaining what repeated use has already selected for, then modifying it under pressure.

Founders who ignore that distinction may still change their companies. They may simply discover too late that they have changed the wrong part.

Sources

• Library of Congress. "Essay on the generative principle of political constitutions." Library of Congress, 1847.
• Jennifer Reingold. "How a Radical Shift Left Zappos Reeling." Fortune, 2016.
• Paul Graham. "Announcing the Safe, a Replacement for Convertible Notes." Y Combinator, 2013.