It’s been some months since Paul Graham published his essay on “Founder Mode”: the idea that there are times when founders should exercise their authority to orient a company’s direction, and, for the lack of better verbiage, take charge. In my techie internet corner, this take was mostly roasted—for lacking specificity and actionable insight, while advocating for even more deference to founders following a solid decade of unabashed advocacy.
But the essay takes on another dimension of animosity when it frames founders against malignant managers, who of course embody the diametrically ineffective “Manager Mode.” For my peers, the thought pieces in response point out the folly of ignoring good management, that running roughshod over the team should be a rare occurrence and not a crutch for repeated micromanagement. Delegation is not only useful because it scales an enterprise; it’s also what enables teams to sum beyond their parts by leveraging the organization’s layers of perspectives, skills, and decision-making capabilities.
The idea of recognizing a distinct Founder Mode feels like a bit of a strawman argument. It’s not like founder-CEOs1 lack the credibility nor the organizational authority to command the rest of the company to follow their chosen direction. In my experience, most CEOs have specific convictions that they’re passionate about and will drive company resources toward those proclivities. At Square, Jack Dorsey was focused on customer applications and insisted on building multiple versions of the Square Wallet before finally finding a fit with Cash App. With Affirm, Max Levchin believed in the physical card form factor, but he patiently waited for the right time and iterated on it a ton in beta before launching it more broadly.
It’s tougher, though, to differentiate some of these moonshots as visionary risky bets to “skate where the puck is going be,” versus the Occam’s Razor explanation of pursuing personal interests with company resources. Square took this to a somewhat ridiculous level: in creating a holding company in Block, it covered everything from Bitcoin maximalism to a music streaming service. Google also made the same move with Alphabet and even explicitly placed the founders in some of its “fun” subsidiaries; Google’s core business just made so much money that people didn’t care for a long time.
The upside of invigorating a bunch of founders to embody this mode to startup success via sheer intensity hasn’t materialized. Perhaps it’s a bit early to tally scores, but as there isn’t an admitted definition of how Founder Mode should be executed, efficacy is granted ex post facto, and if there were bad behaviors along the way they can be naturally rationalized. This utility, though, skirts dangerously close to reframing Founder Mode as another manifestation of tech bro hustle culture.
Hell, most of the initial wave of memes picked up on this.
And this extends to other C-level founders.↩
