Founder Mode

Extracted Attributes

• Benefits

  Effective for founders before product-market fit, beneficial for 'war-time CEOs', leads to better outcomes than pure delegation.

• Definition

  A leadership approach characterized by a direct, hands-on style of company management, where founders are deeply invested in the details rather than delegating responsibilities through a top-down structure.

• Originator

  Paul Graham

• Popularized By

  Paul Graham

• Contrasted With

  Manager Mode, conventional delegation, hands-off approach

• Key Characteristics

  Direct involvement in company details, passion for customer and problems, collaboration with product teams, focus on discovering and delivering winning solutions.

• Potential Criticisms

  Can be mistaken for 'swagger', associated with micromanagement, may create toxic ego trips, perceived as less accessible for women founders.

• Date of Popularization

  2024-09

• Application in Venture Capital

  Used by Keith Rabois for 'Founder assessment' in early-stage investments.

Timeline

• Paul Graham publishes an essay popularizing the term 'Founder Mode' in response to a talk by Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky. (Source: Wikipedia)

  2024-09

Founder mode

Founder mode is a term used and popularized by Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham in a September 2024 essay in response to a talk delivered by Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky. It describes a specific kind of leadership in which a founder has a direct, hands-on approach to their company rather than breaking up and delegating responsibility through a top-down structure. Often cited examples of leaders embodying founder mode include Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Jensen Huang. Immediately after its online publication, Graham's essay led to widespread debate and discourse about the different methodologies regarding how to run a company, the pros and cons of micromanagement, and the nature of founder personalities versus that of non-founders, among other relevant concerns. It also spurred many memes, jokes, and stereotypes about the culture surrounding Silicon Valley and big tech.

Web Search Results

• Founder mode

  Founder mode is a term used and popularized by Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham "Paul Graham (programmer)") in a September 2024 essay in response to a talk delivered by Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky. It describes a specific kind of leadership in which a founder has a direct, hands-on approach to their company rather than breaking up and delegating responsibility through a top-down structure. Often cited examples of leaders embodying founder mode include Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Jensen [...] In The Verge, Chesky himself stated that founder mode was an appealing name but lamented that due to its viral traction, founder mode became mistakenly associated with "swagger" and repeatedly parroted by people who didn't actually know what Graham had meant. As a point of clarification, Chesky stated that founder mode was about leaders being invested in the details of their companies rather than losing sight of expertise through chains of management. Chesky also stated that chief executive [...] Many women in the tech sector and other industries, such as Summer Health founder Ellen DaSilva, pointed out that founder mode was a methodology available only to male founders and that women in leadership roles rarely were given the same leeway to micromanage their companies.

• We Are Not The Same: The Obligatory Post on "Founder ...

  Founder-mode is defined in opposition to manager-mode, the conventional wisdom as taught in business schools, about how to manage an organization. The basic idea is that b-school teaches managers to delegate and empower, lest they be guilty of micromanagement. But, in founder mode, founders dive heroically into details penetrating the gaslighting of their value-destroying C-level execs, which include — and this is an actual quote — “some of the most skillful liars in the world.” [...] We Are Not The Same: The Obligatory Post on “Founder Mode” [Updated 9/23 to include link to a Brian Chesky interview discussing Founder Mode.] Founder mode became all the rage last week, following a Brian Chesky speech (whose contents are seemingly not available online) and a Paul Graham blog post about that speech. Since everyone’s weighing in on founder mode, and a few long-term readers have specifically asked for my take, that will be the subject of this post.

• Founder Mode: A sign you have yet to, or failed to, hire the ...

  The essence of “founder mode,” or diving deep, is a fantastic concept. I see successful founders use it all the time. They find places where things aren’t working, deep-dive into them, fix them, make sure they’re staffed with the right people, and move on. This is a best practice for any founder before they reach product-market fit and scalable sales motion. Founder mode might also be beneficial for war-time CEOs, when there is a monumental market shift or a crisis that affects your company. [...] Sitemap Open in app Sign in Sign in # Founder Mode: A sign you have yet to, or failed to, hire the right people and build the right culture. Amir Shevat 3 min readSep 4, 2024 Why founder-mode is a cop out as you grow your business. Silicon Valley is in an uproar about a new concept everybody’s talking about called “founder mode”. [...] Another negative aspect of perpetual founder mode is that it can create a toxic ego trip (not uncommon in Silicon Valley) for your startup. Founders who want everything done exactly the way they want it will attract drones, not creative people. Talented people understand that leadership sometimes needs to be in founder mode, but if it persists for too long, they feel strangled and leave.

• Coaching Founder Mode - Silicon Valley Product Group

  Founder mode does not mean hands-off delegation, but it also does not mean micro-managing. It is a manifestation of the passion for the customer and the problems to be solved, with the goal of collaborating closely with product teams to discover and deliver winning solutions. The key to scaling successfully for a product model company is to have strong, founder-mode leaders that work to develop other strong, founder-mode leaders. [...] Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Reed Hastings, Daniel Ek, Elon Musk, and Patrick and John Collison, are several well-known examples of founders that built their companies with Founder Mode.2 [...] Yes, he had the moral authority of the founder, but he also was there from the beginning, experiencing every success and failure, and learning along with his teams. Steve Jobs personified Founder Mode.1 As Paul noted in his article, many smart founders figure out that the delegation model might sound nice, but the negative consequences in practice are hard to miss.

• Founder Mode

  disagrees with you, your default assumption should be that you're mistaken. But this is one of the rare exceptions. VCs who haven't been founders themselves don't know how founders should run companies, and C-level execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the world. Whatever founder mode consists of, it's pretty clear that it's going to break the principle that the CEO should engage with the company only via his or her direct reports. "Skip-level" meetings will become the [...] existence of another mode from the dismay of founders who've tried it, and the success of their attempts to escape from it. There are as far as I know no books specifically about founder mode. Business schools don't know it exists. All we have so far are the experiments of individual founders who've been figuring it out for themselves. But now that we know what we're looking for, we can search for it. I hope in a few years founder mode will be as well understood as manager mode. We can already [...] company to company. They'll even vary from time to time within the same company, as managers earn trust. So founder mode will be more complicated than manager mode. But it will also work better. We already know that from the examples of individual founders groping their way toward it. Indeed, another prediction I'll make about founder mode is that once we figure out what it is, we'll find that a number of individual founders were already most of the way there — except that in doing what they