One minute you’re “very demure,” the next you’re in “founder mode.” As the winds of the internet blow, so too do our mercurial mindsets.
Founder mode comes via an essay that Y Combinator founding partner Paul Graham published on Sunday.
At a recent YC event, Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky talked about how he was initially told to hire good people, then stand back, which turned out to be bad advice.
This led Graham to write about how there are two ways to run a company:
- Manager mode, in which founders delegate tasks to others.
- Founder mode, a less-discussed but valuable method in which founders remain involved, even as the company scales.
The case for founder mode is that manager mode creates distance between the founder and company operations. Per Graham, it allows “professional fakers” to “drive the company into the ground” while founders are busy not micromanaging them.
But… is that true?
Business leaders and experts weighed in, with some praising founder mode and others expressing skepticism.
While Graham pointed to Steve Jobs as a good example of founder mode, The Information founder Jessica Lessin noted that Jobs had Tim Cook. She wrote that founders “are usually pretty annoying to work for” and need solid managers to keep their vision alive.
Investor Dan Rose, a former Amazon and Facebook exec, praised Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg’s micromanaging leadership style, while VC Sam Gerstenzang wrote that Jeff Bezos and Netflix founder Reed Hastings’ playbook actually involved hiring the right people to spend more time on whatever was most important and reducing information barriers.
Swedish investor Henrik Torstensson wrote it’s not which method but the execution, calling Microsoft CEO — but not founder — Satya Nadella a great manager-mode leader.
It seems like, as Graham’s essay suggests, there isn’t a clear playbook for founder mode, and thus, it’s hard to define. It’s possible that the best leaders toggle between both modes, and the dated advice to just back off needs a fresh look — if not a new buzzword.
