What is "founder mode"?
tomblomfield.com
tomblomfield.com
here's the stock charts of the founder of founder mode vs a professional manager mode guy :)
https://x.com/ericnewcomer/status/1830998969490526423
just a fun reminder not to take everything as gospel.
to engage more substantively with TFA:
> I think the general pattern that Brian was identifying was the following. A young, inexperienced founder with limited management experience is running a rapidly scaling company. Famous VCs invest a lot of money and join the board. Headcount passes 100 and quickly grows beyond 1000. The VCs (who often have never run anything themselves) encourage the founder to hire “executives” with “scaling experience”. > > The founder is told to “empower” these executives, who typically then implement techniques that worked for them at previous companies. But, too often, these techniques fail in the new company.
yes, i have worked at a company where this happened — sans the "quickly grows beyond 1000" - we never got there before our hired gun execs made enough political moves to effectively kill the company momentum. i dont know if our founder couldve righted the ship by himself since he had his own issues to overcome, but i'm 100% sure he would have been better off just having the hired guns be advisors rather than management layers.
I've always told myself if I start a company that ever reaches, say, 250+ employees, I'd step down. First, playing a management game doesn't interest me (it's sort of like Risk vs Monopoly; the former is fun, the latter I find boring). And second, I just like building things. I wish the meme/essay would be about "builder mode" because I do think that's more of a thing than "founder mode."
I also think, uncontroversially I'd wager, that the skillset is just different. Building an MVP, finding product market fit, pivoting, trying new things, failing, and doing it all over (and over, and over) again is just absolutely fundamentally different than running a large corporation, trying to maneuver around market sentiment, dealing with politics, and so on.
It could just be luck. But you're not likely to learn much without also talking to all the people who were just as talented and still failed.
The problem is about delegating effectively, especially in the case of delegating to executives. The issue is treating parts of the org as "black boxes" and optimising for the wrong thing as a founder. Some founders/CEOs delegate the things they don't want to do or aren't good at. Others want to reinvent the wheel in terms of what "managing" and "direct reports" means. Still others just want to set the vision and hire some "strategists" etc. (who's doing the work?)
Founder mode is basically optimising for the quality of the product down to the gritty details and keeping wannabe professional fakers that manage up on a short leash.
It's less about that distinction and more about not turning execs into mini 'CEO/founders' - their incentives are completely different. When the full extent of the damage they've caused reveals itself, most execs will be long gone.
Back then, you were more likely than not to get an engineer dealing with your customer support queries. There was a Slack community, a forum community and it felt very much like a scrappy little start-up that was truly making a difference in what - in the UK - had been an industry dominated by companies that didn't really care about user experience or modern technology (I'd had the misfortune of doing work for some of those banks). They even had an API which customers could use to get their own data!
The pace of progress was rapid, too. I remember asking Tom if he'd ever consider offering business current accounts, since the competition was pretty dire at the time - the answer back then was a "no, we're focussing on retail" - but I'm happy to use my Monzo business account daily now!
I had the opportunity to work on a proposal and sit down with some folks from one of Monzo's partnerships team a few weeks back for a potential collaboration which ultimately didn't end up going forwards. The staff were lovely, but it didn't feel like quite the same company I'd visited in-person years ago to collect my pre-paid card from. I guess that's something that inevitably happens as companies scale up.
If you are ever confused about founder-mode vs manager-mode, this is the one single insight that you need to internalize.
Put in other words, the org needs leaders who drive from the front. Not managers who build empires and run performance reviews from the back.
Driving from the front involves looking at external-facing data - customer happiness, features that land better, maintenance of services - things that make the customers life better - whether internal customer of external customer. They need to spend a lot of time collaborating with peer leaders, distant leaders, diagonal leaders, different departments regardless of anyone's position in the org chart.
However, most large tech companies are filled with dogshit management that tries to micromanage number of commits, meetings, standups, Jira points, velocity, performance calibrations, stack ranking, PIPs - aka inward looking things that are mostly set up to catch their own people doing something. Also called politics - personal gain triumphs all.
Even a 5th grader can tell you - practice makes perfect. And if your leaders are practicing inward politics as opposed to outward exploration and collaboration, you are getting exactly what they are practicing - inward politics.
Funny - I took a manager role where the company was trying this approach. I was the manager, but I wasn’t empowered to manage the team or their work. They had a lot of feel-good ideas about empowering employees and reducing the role of managers.
It had the same result. Lowest productivity period of my career, for the entire company. It turns out there is some value to traditional management structures when implemented properly. Nearly all of the companies that experiment with weird management structure ideas seem to discover this eventually, and either revert to traditional management structures or they get built up in the shadows via social standing within the company.
"Productivity" is a nebulous concept in knowledge work. So unless you're referring to a factory with a very concrete, measurable output, this isn't particularly meaningful term.
How was the quality and employee satisfaction (as shown by solicited feedback or subjective anecdotes, plus attrition/turnover, etc.)?
Happiness was down too because everyone just wanted to work, but we had these obscure rules about who could decide what was worked on (not managers) that turned into roadblocks to getting anything done across teams.
This wasn’t a case where “productivity” was an abstract metric that wasn’t measuring the right thing. It was just gridlock where nothing was getting done because nobody was allowed to be empowered to direct things.
These are the sort of ideas that, at best, seem like they should be explored with an isolated R&D approach, or simply left to academics.
And, if they are executed realtime with a companies mainline workforce and somehow succeed, it should be clearly stated and understood that it was—like much "success"—by no small amount of sheer luck (or happenstance via uncontrolled factors, if you prefer), force of will, and patience by the team as a whole, rather than the usual narrative which is the inspired actions of single prescient individual (who will then go on to write a book and give TED Talks about an approach that absolutely cannot be applied anywhere else and does not scale.)
In the end they got increased productivity out of me because I thought I was flagged in some faceless soulless nonsensical “insights” dashboard.
And by productive I mean that I feel like I made more impactful changes than usually, so I’m not referring to GitHub stats with fake cheat PRs and changes.
There is also this checklist I used to use for more "practical references" https://www.craftengineer.com/the-founder-mode-used-by-brian...
none of the items listed there preclude a CEO from only talking to direct reports and viewing the org chart as a set of black boxes that their reports are responsible. having "engineering and design report to the founder" doesn't mean anything. is that saying everyone who does engineering and design has an executive as their manager?
nothing in that list talks about hiring or firing practices.
whomever wrote this post would have great success as an object-oriented clean code thought leader, where their skills at saying nothing would earn them slots at conferences and social media followers.
Some nice take always:
-Never make someone a manager if they are not capable of being an being an reasonably competent _technical_ IC.
-If there is a situation where a manager who is not a capable ( for what ever reason) IC manages a team, then a capable IC member must be given authority to overrule any decisions that the manager may make. In this case the manger is just a co-ordinater/secretary.
- When a potential manager joins a company, make them do IC works. (already covered in the essay : ' customer service for one day a month..' )
Not to mention, PG is taking the dangerous route and only looking at a few data points (let's be honest, just one - Brian Chesky, not even Joe or Nate) and trying to extrapolate that over the rest of the domain.
According to PG, Sam was one of his favorite founder types a decade earlier. How did that founder mode work out, except for a failed startup, then having to kick him out of YC, and now heading a startup where all the core team members left for greener pastures? If Loopt did pan out, I'm sure PG would be raving over Sam instead.
At this point, it's about time PG steps out of his inner circle shell and actually meet some successful founders in the YC community on the regular.
For me, "founder mode" just means being extremely motivated to go "harder, better, faster, stronger" (ala Daft Punk and Kanye).
You don't need to be a founder to be motivated and just because you're a founder doesn't mean you're motivated. But the two nicely line up.
Calling it founder mode has obviously been a great way to get nerds to argue about it, so good on pg.
> how do good leaders stay in the detail and run great companies at scale?
It's a relevant question not just for founders but for leaders at every level.
IMO, one test for a "good leader" is whether they are capable of doing the work 1 to 2 levels down into their teams. The more familiarity they have, the more they are able to hire, fire, and evaluate those people. After all, it's pretty hard to evaluate work in an unfamiliar domain. Paradoxically, though, good leaders do not contribute to that work directly. So how do they maintain their skills if they don't do the work?
Consider the case of a front-line engineering manager with IC engineer reports. A good one will know their team's codebase, know where it could be easily extended and have good intuition for the time required for any given feature idea. They know the difference between good and bad code. But they NEVER submit PRs, mostly because the maker schedule/manager schedule problem [1] forces a choice of doing only one type of work well. (Every new manager I've seen who wants to "spend 10-30% of their time writing code" will either fail to support that code or fail to support their team as a manager, when in a fast growing team or company.)
The solution for eng. managers is to have the codebase on their machine, be able to build and run it, and occasionally implement their own experiments or POCs. These things NEVER go to production. It's meant purely to maintain the manager's familiarity with the codebase and staying current with their team's output. (Hat tip to CW).
Note that we still don't have good labels for these behaviors. "Hands on" and "hands off" confuses the issue-- is the example above "hands on" or "hands off?" It's both and neither, because those aren't useful labels.
There are other solutions for leaders higher up the org chart. The article mentions skip level 1:1s and niche area deep dives both with the purpose of evaluating leadership effectiveness. When I did these, I'd always start with setting the same context: I have two goals for this meeting and one non-goal. I want to hear about what you're working on, what's going well and where the challenges are. I also want to answer any questions you have about what's going on elsewhere in the company. My non-goal is giving you specific direction, since that's always between you and your manager. I'm just here to gather and share information.
The role of a leader is to set goals, share context and ensure the right team is in place, hiring and firing as needed. They need to know what's going on from top to bottom in the teams they lead, and in order to hire effectively, they need to be capable of doing the work 1-2 levels below them. But they never actually contribute 1-2 levels down, because that would severely undermine the people they've delegated to.
I think this is why so many had a knee-jerk reaction to in PG's founder mode essay, where he implied that founders have a special ability to bypass management layers and contribute directly (in the Steve Jobs example). I've seen it happen, and it failed 100% of the time. 100%. After establishing some amount of managerial structure -- wild guess would be after 50+ total employees -- contributing directly several layers down into your team is a recipe for disaster. The puzzle is how to lead effectively without making that mistake.
[1] maker schedule/manager schedule https://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html * Bonus behavior: good managers are sensitive to booking meetings with any of their team members who are on the maker schedule.
It's easy to say "the high-level goal is maximizing profit" but as we all lament daily, having that as a goal is both vapid and only functional in the short-term.
But there's no discernment, no conviction. No actual 'seeing', just words and concepts thrown together in an attempt to pass muster. You can argue that's all that humans are doing, and to be sure, there are many people who are faking it like this all the time, sometimes through their entire life, and even in high-level positions. One of them is even running for president right now. But when you compare one of these fakers with someone who has actual principles and values and meaningful goals, there's clearly a bright line difference. And there's no way the current round of AI/LLMs could have that, no matter how much they sell it or say that's around the corner.
FWIW, I would never describe any of the (successful, with exits and now-successful brands) founders I worked for this way. It's disgusting.
It's been a long, long time since pg had to answer to employees. He clearly no longer understands the current labor market, nor what it implies about actual workplace conditions.
EDIT: To be clear, "obsessive" attention to detail is still what makes products work coherently. It's the rhetoric that an individual, even a "founder" taking on mountains of potential value, should (or even can) shoulder and internalize this, without breaking, that is inherently wrong.
Customer support mistakes are unavoidable in large companies and AirBNB definitely isn't the worst offender in that regard, but I can't really imagine a bigger example of dysfunction in a B2C business than customer support resolution being the CEO needing to respond to personal messages of customers well connected enough to reach him via private channels. But now customer support failure is actually something to aspire to, provided it involves the important virtue of CEOs being busy at weekends.
The original essay felt more like scrabbling around for a reason why founders felt their companies were less effective with more levels of hierarchy whilst somehow missing the essential truth that managing a team of 1000 is harder than managing a team of 15 no matter how you do it. I'm just here for all the wild takes on founder greatness and founder obligation that came with it!
The goal is to make a business out of the higher margin parts that scale easily, and leave the lower margin customer-obsessive parts to others.
Prices are similar to hotels.com, with silly house rules, cleaning fees and hassle vs just turning up and leaving.
I've used Airbnb for years, and it was truly revolutionary back in the day.
Airbnb may very well be making its customers happy, but when so many of those customers are 21 year-olds looking for party houses they can trash and fundamentally changing the character and safety of entire neighborhoods, is that really the most important thing? Even as the founder or executive or both of a business, you're still part of a human community and you have a duty to that community not to worsen the lives of countless bystanders in order to delight the few who happen to pay you. Make products that are valuable in general, to everybody, not products that are valuable only to your customers at everyone else's expense.
That said: there's a real phenomenon Graham and Chesky were grappling with, and if you've done startups for awhile --- startups, in particular, because they give you the vantage point of seeing a company's management processes develop from zero --- you've almost certainly seen it yourself. Not enough has been written about it! The point Graham was trying to make isn't banal (or wrong).
It's just not fully formed, and is being taken that way.
It's a complete clown show, but people love to believe stories about people bucking the system, so they eat it up.
pg gets a pass for building outsized value (YC pre 2020), but the rest should probably not flex their luck and confuse it with success and spare us their 'wisdom'
Who dat?
I have watched so many amazing and sustainable products die because someone let the MBAs in. After sitting through so much of this crap dogma in my own business school classes, I would say the vast majority of what they/we are taught is actively harmful to most businesses.
To replace it you must come up with something that works even better.
Like, yes, let me completely redo my entire life path so I can redo one stupid argument.... I would love to, but I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth that gives me the sapce to explore these things, and I have more practical matters to attend to. Until then, we're going to be complaining to anyone that would listen.
This is why we elect representatives to handle our complaints. Except in the business world there are no representatives and the regulatory bodies are actively made toothless (by business interests), so the only prevailing doctrine is the one that allows the people at the top to steal ("capture") the most value from the process. Everyone else can just go fuck themselves, amiright? This is a system that needs to be destroyed.
I said that to replace it you must come up with something better.
I don't believe at all in the theory that if we only destroy the old system completely, a new just and effective system will arise from the ashes.
I don't claim to know what a replacement would look like, but I personally think it would hold 'servant leadership' as a primary tenet, and destroy the notion of shareholder primacy, and have some sort of increasing level of entropy that scales as the business does, to the point where large companies are simply unsustainable for all but the most important of endeavors.
Huh? I thought it was obvious: don't hire the MBA types as managers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41545495
https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1fgv248/fuck_founder_...
On the basketball court, when someone's got a hot hand: Damn, he's going founder mode.
At dinner, when someone devours a meal: I went founder mode on that shit dude.
I wonder if 'founder mode' is the antithesis to Agile as getting shit done is against the manifesto (in practice).