Let's not talk about founder mode.
First, I'm putting a quarter in the "founder mode" swear jar.
It’s not often that the Internet conspires to discuss the exact same topic all at once, but unfortunately that is exactly what happened last week. One of Paul Graham’s essays broke through every single subculture on X and LinkedIn, and I found friends from every walk of life asking me what I thought about “founder mode.” I wanted to create a “founder mode” jar akin to a swear jar: every time you say it, you have to put a quarter in the pot.
I really respect Paul Graham and love his essays — I think he truly has a gift for crystallizing what is true and hard about starting a company. He is simple, insightful, and clear. And there’s a lot to love about founder mode. There’s something true about the fact that nobody has the same incentive and power to meticulously care about your company as you, the founder does. As a founder, you’re probably better at just getting things done yourself instead of working through people. You might want to learn how to be a good manager, but you might just be bad at it — and stakes are too high for you to learn at this stage! You look with frustration as the organization trends towards bullshit, thanks to hapless management and self-serving executives. In those times, founders might feel like the only people with the authority and incentive to cut through that rot.
However, I think it’s interesting that we’re using founder mode to compare the best of founders against the worst of executives. According to PG’s essay, management sucks, and founders are Brian Chesky-like geniuses:
Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it's described that way, doesn't it? Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.
Oh jeez. As someone who was usually rebelling against all forms of authority within companies, I hear you — management can really suck! So many professional fakers exist. I’m constitutionally really averse to “managing up1.” However, while managers can suck, so can founders! I’ve seen founders lose their heads and act like ego-maniacs before, acting just as self-interestedly as any failed executive. This “strawman manager” to “steelman founder” argument is hilarious. What if we compare the bear case founder to the bull case manager? Why not compare Ryan Breslow to Frank Slootman? If you did, wouldn’t you come to the opposite conclusion, that “manager mode” is correct? That seems absolutely silly.
Look, here’s the thing: the goal of the company is just to win. Founder mode, manager mode — doesn’t matter, just win. And I think it’s very unlikely that founder mode is any sort of practical strategy to win more often.
As Benn Stancil very aptly said:
This version—founder mode as a vibe—probably isn’t very useful. It is yet another cliche that, though perhaps not necessarily wrong, provides no practical guidance on how to actually navigate managerial challenges. It is a headline, a pull quotes, a bulleted listicle, packaged into bite-sized tweet or podcast soundbite that is designed to be consumed by inexperienced executives in the back of an Uber.4 Examples of how to put these ideas into practice, the complicated nuance behind applying them in real-life situations to real-life people, and the exceptions that reveal that they’re not irrefutable laws of startup leadership do not fit into the meme.5 Founder mode is not advice; it’s something to yell when you bulldoze into a meeting and make the decision yourself.
Do you want to be a person that gets their management advice from little tweet soundbites? No? Well, there we go.
Here’s what I read this week, only partially about founder mode:
Benn Stancil on Founder Mode: This is what I quoted from above!
Absolutely hilarious post by Sridhar: The Snowflake CEO cannot post that he does founder mode via his use of OKRs. It is so cringe. I do not know what to say, except “please don’t tweet.” It says nothing about his competence at his job and everything about the fact he spent decades at Giant Company. Same goes for the Instacart CEO. Absolutely hilarious.
Ah, Steve: “Founders (intellectually independent, liberated from group think or office politics) have all flocked to Founder Mode, the hot new theory that they're uniquely brilliant and wonderful. "How can this groupthink be wrong if all the people who normally agree with each other agree!?"
This Sam Lessin take is the steelman of Founder Mode: Middle management was the problem, and they were a necessary evil until now. Sam Lessin believes that the real problem with Management Mode is the rot of incentives within the many layers of middle management, not the empowered business-outcome owners. I agree that middle management is a true curse for everyone involved. Good middle managers hate their position in the org. Bad middle managers detract from the organization. I think Sam Lessin is very insightful and clear here. As a cheeky aside, I saw that Patrick Collison is a reviewer of the Founder Mode essay — I really want someone to ask in Stripe’s Friday Executive Q&A: “Patrick, saw you endorse Founder Mode as a theory — as a result, which managers would you most like to fire and why? You can name them or just suggest entire orgs.”
on “Founders should learn management”: I mentioned above that the Brian Chesky/Airbnb story doesn’t so much say that founder mode is better than management mode as it does Brian Chesky is a bad manager. Brian needed to become an IC PM again, in an attempt to cosplay as Steve Jobs, to direct his organization. He did not learn how to do it effectively as a manager. Sam addresses this point by highlighting the founders that avoided this problem by learning and wielding management skills very effectively. Bezos was a manager. He got into the details, gave people agency, and held them accountable.
Focus, the ASML Way: The Red Queen podcast is doing ASML next (yee haw!) and I have LOVED this book that we read as a part of our research. It is an excellent example of what good management (and intentionally abstracting details!) can do. For example, ASML’s strategy is to intentionally use suppliers for all of its components — ASML "just assembles.” It is manager mode at its finest: it has black boxes for each of its core components!
Saruman versus Radagast: Founder mode is for Sarumans. Shaper mode is for Radagasts.
Against self-criticism: I asked my friend M to send me his “canon” — aka the things that I could read that most influenced and shaped his world view. This essay was in his canon, and feels so right. Self criticism feels so violent.
Lacan said that there was surely something ironic about Christ’s injunction to love thy neighbour as thyself – because actually, of course, people hate themselves. Or you could say that, given the way people treat one another, perhaps they had always loved their neighbours in the way they loved themselves: that is, with a good deal of cruelty and disregard.
Idol, Burning: I read this on a friend’s recommendation — it won the Man Booker-equivalent in Japan and was all the rage. The author was born in 1999. It’s about being young in modern Japan, centered in a story of pop-star worship. It was very well written but also so puzzling. If you really understand Japanese culture, I’d be curious for your take!
God’s vegetable soup: I apologize for my last soup recommendation. It sucked. The pumpkin got mushy and the beans were too soggy. Broccoli overwhelmed everything (the taste of broc is always so overwhelming, wish I added kale instead.) However, this is my best-ever soup recommendation. I make it every month. Inspired by my friends that did homemade food delivery when I had Covid (I cried, I was so touched), I started making and delivering this soup for sick friends. It is so nourishing and tasty. Do not skip the parmesan rind and the lemon-rosemary oil! I always add a can of diced tomato, sometimes fire roasted if I’m feeling frisky.
I feel like I’m saying “I’m not a regular executive, I’m a cool executive!” but I think that’s true. I am outcome-oriented (to a fault) and therefore do not fall into the PG-described manager mode trap. I fall into different traps (forget to celebrate wins and be friendly with the other execs), but we can talk about that in another post.
Sridhar’s post does feel cringy but Fidji’s read well IMO