This whole article is written around one key sentence:
> There are things founders can do that managers can't, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because it is.
But there are absolutely no examples given of what these things actually are. Paul kinda vibes around that vague statement for 5 more paragraphs, giving absolutely nothing concrete.
And to be honest this hn comment section scares me, as it feels like people are discussing Paul’s new clothes without actually voicing out what they are talking about.
I think Paul is pointing at something I've heard described as integrated complexity, basically someone who can hold the entire business in their head and understand how all the problems interact at all levels of abstractions. Not everyone can do this, but the people who can are better served if they exercise the ability because it improves alignment and accountability.
When you assign a person to a problem (hr policy, infrastructure scaling, new UX capability) they will treat that problem as most important, and if then they break it down a certain way and delegate parts those people will do the same with their respective parts. Like a game of telephone eventually what's actually important and what people think is important will drift apart, and before you know it a lot of people are working and doing stuff that doesn't really matter or is even counter productive.
A founder who can hold the whole business in their head and inspects the whole company at all levels continuously will spot and challenge/correct these drifts.
I think it was from Creativity Inc I read that Steve Jobs would challenge engineers about things and if the engineer stood up to him and made their case and it made sense and fit into the vision Steve would commend them and give them the autonomy, at least for that decision/project, but if the engineer folded or couldn't make a case for why it was the right decision he would steamroll them.
So I think founder mode is basically inspecting and challenging the company at all levels to maximize progress towards realizing a vision, and only people who are great visionaries and can also understand and judge the vision-alignment of unlimited micro decisions across many disciplines are able to operate this way.
I run a payments startup, but to ktlo, I had to do consulting work, and I’d hired a sales person to acquire and manage clients. When I realized consulting was taking too much time and focus, I ended it. It took the better part of a year to get the sales person to stop finding more clients. They didn’t get why I would end something that was generating revenue, and kept trying to talk me out of it with “this is such a great deal, it’s a quick project, pays well, etc”. Imagine this across all depts. This is how businesses lose focus, everyone thinks they just need to make their case.
This does resonate but I don't think it's necessarily a "founder" vs. "manager" thing. I've seen at least one company that was not successful under its founders and where a hired CEO took it to the next level. That hired CEO operated closer to what you'd call "founder mode". Both these companies grew to multi-billion dollar valuations and would have likely never gotten there without hiring a CEO and both executed really well by any measure.
I've also seen founders that weren't really at a level where they could "founder mode" and micromanaged things badly. Those founders are the ones that tend to apply the bad advice pg discusses and who can't really tell the difference if they've hired a good or not so good person and whether they're doing a good job or not.
I totally agree that you need people with the ability to hold the big picture in their head. This can be the entire company but it can also be one product or project within the company. Trying to construct this picture out of pieces in multiple people's heads is vastly inferior and is a factor in the failure of projects/products and companies. You can't separate vision/what/how across people.
What I don't think we want to take away from this is that the founder is always right or that you shouldn't hire good people and let them do their job. I don't think these two statements are accurate. The "founder" (or manager) does need to make sure that things come together, i.e. you don't have engineers building the wrong things. But you do need good people and you do need to let them do their job.
I agree that the labels Paul used already carry meaning that confuses what I think Paul is really trying to point out. I also agree that it's really hard to tell whether someone is capable of leading in "founder mode", and to what degree.
Ray Dalio describes these people as "Shapers", and maybe using a new term is the right way to go.
So putting this term to work, Paul's point is that the best way to run a company when the leader is a shaper isn't going to be the same as when the leader isn't a shaper. And to your point not all founders are Shapers and not all Shapers are founders.
I would really underline the ability of the founder to have this pretty unique ability to see and set the strategic direction of the startup which requires a lot of abstract thinking with the tactical and operational skills to make sure you earn money right now.
A founder lives their company as the most important thing in their life, it's an extension of their life and they live and breath the company. A manager instead is being given a responsibility and will try their best to fulfill the role.
A founder will never rest if they know there's an issue to be solved in the company, while the manager has a life and know they can move forward in case.
A founder will not be intimidated by any internal policy or rule if they believe they need to change something. A manager will try to play by the rules, and in case try to modify them through influence.
A founder is basically a ruler who truly care about the success of the company (not necessarily about the happiness and fulfilment of the people taking part in the company).
For a funder the Company comes first, before anything else.
> A founder lives their company as the most important thing in their life, it's an extension of their life and they live and breath the company.
i generally consider myself a hard worker and i have done plenty of overtime in my career. i would feel pity for anyone who felt this way about any company, unless they were literally curing cancer or giving us infinite energy.
At a purely financial level, making their company the most important thing in their life for a period of maybe 5-10 years means that they have a good chance at not having to work at all for the rest of their life. Doing 5-10 years of overtime for someone else falls quite short of that in most cases.
You're obviously not a startup founder with an attitude like that. And it's OK: being a founder of a startup really isn't for everyone, for good reason. Most startups fail, remember. And like you, most people don't want to dedicate their life to a company. I wouldn't want to be a founder either: I like having a life outside work. Founders are different; their company is their "baby" so they have an entirely different outlook to work than the rest of us.
Your comment doesn't seem to describe you in a founder role, because founders don't do overtime. Whether or not it's healthy, and it often comes with a price, the entire concept is there's no separation (at least in the early days) between them and the company. They embody the company. So they aren't working hard or doing overtime, they're doing "whatever it takes". The grandparent concept is alluding to this different.
Based on pg's other work, I would guess that previous drafts of this essay had concrete examples, but they were removed after deciding that including them would make the discussion all about those specifics.
But in general I think it's clear: founder mode here means having strong opinions about all parts of the company. Maybe it's a technical founder telling salespeople what they should emphasise in their sales pitches, or a nontechnical founder giving directions on choice of technical architecture. (And I think either of those examples would provoke different reactions in most people here).
I would argue that being a great operator (what he derides as manager mode) requires setting clear outputs and expectations from who you are delegating to. If your company turns to hell because you've delegated too hands off, that's a sign you aren't skilled enough at delegating. He calls this "founder mode" but this can be done by any highly skilled manager/operator.
> I would guess that previous drafts of this essay had concrete examples
It's always bothered me to no end that PG has his essays read by others prior to posting. This isn't academia (or an application to college or a job application) and he's not writing for a journal and requiring peer review (or comments or suggestions). Fine it's his own style apparently.
Now what would be very interesting is to see some of the reply comments on the drafts of the PG essays (and how extensive they are).
Is it possible this essay about founder mode is itself written in founder mode?
Whatever the "it" is that constitutes a startup's purpose often can't be fully articulated in mission statements, OKRs, core values, etc. Either it's simply ineffable, or it's a metamorphosizing snapshot of the leading edge of a rapid process of discovery. Expecting such an already-abstruse concept to faithfully percolate down a rigid reporting chain is ridiculous, like sending old-English scrolls via carrier pigeon to narrate a live sporting event.
But communication of the "it" still has to happen, if imperfectly. So someone in founder mode would naturally focus on delivering the most faithful and timely version of "it" to the points in the organization where it'll have the most impact and be least susceptible to corruption in transit. Today that might be to a UX engineer. Tomorrow it might be to the board. It's a kind of plate-spinning that aims to reduce skew from the latest version.
You keep speaking of "it". I have had experience with "it". Sometimes it turns out that "It" is this very scary clown show that percolates down into the rest of the organization in a "cover your ass" mentality that is simply based on nothing but personal incentives to not be fired. "It" can indeed be percolated by clowns in the organization in this case.
Couldn’t agree more. He’s talking about a management style in such a nebulous way, when I would imagine his experience and proximity to so many founders/companies could provide a little more concrete substance. This feels like a first draft, and should have “Dig deeper” written in red across the top
I think it is obliquely getting at a difference between founder and manager that is very real: a founder has a moral authority over the vision that a manager does not. We can argue whence it comes but it is palpable from strong founder leaders. There is a general sense that they hold the entire business in their head.
A founder can wield this to effect changes that would be nearly impossible without it. In this sense, a founder can solve some problems in every part of the organization that no manager can. If a founder delegates everything to managers, or cannot identify problems best addressed with this founder's tool, then you are setting up managers to be ineffective in some situations that could have been solved by the founder stepping in. I think this is also part of what makes founder-led companies different generally. Professional managers do not have this tool at their disposal to solve organizational problems.
It requires judiciously picking when and where to leverage this power. Applying it unnecessarily will have the effect of disempowering your managers, and now you have a new organizational problem.
I'd rather a C- college essay that is saying something right than an A+ that is very convincing bs. A decent number of well rated business books are the latter.
As far as I can tell he’s provided an empty vessel with a smart-sounding, but undefined term, and this entire thread is people projecting their beliefs into that vessel.
Nearly none of these comments are grounded in his actual text.
It's only "right" because you echo his thoughts. If it were written properly with examples and proper reasoning it would entice those who don't share his opinion to consider their stance.
I don't disagree with your criticism of his post, but to your question — as best I can tell, "founder mode" means maintaining a high level of personal involvement in product design and decision-making, even as the company grows. Trusting and delegating tasks to specific individuals but retaining a hands-on approach.
To some extent, the concept must remain vague because its meaning will vary from one company to another. Typically, there are one or two critical aspects that are most important for a startup or company, and the founder must be involved in those areas in a way that conflicts with the usual corporate structure or hierarchy.
A founding CTO is more effective than a hired CTO, because the founding CTO has more moral authority to create a consistent system. In other companies there's infighting between people (senior engineers, senior managers) with different architectural preferences (e.g. microservices vs monoliths, Java vs Python). These senior people get half what they want, meaning half your system works one way and half the other. A CTO can hold to their singular vision.
It could be that the moral authority stems from having as much of a full picture as a single person can have over the entire lifecycle of the company, but I think a lot is also just the effect of "I got you here."
I'm glad pg named this effect, since I've talked about the related phenomenon for CTOs with many people.
As someone who runs a company, this article resonated with me. This stuff happens in every department and has a lot to do with how the company is run day to day. If you think about the major deliverables of a department - and pick any department - “manager culture” says the head of that department produces the deliverable internally, getting feedback from stakeholders outside their team perhaps, but “owning” the decision. Thus the product roadmap is “owned” by the product team, and the person the VP PM or CPO reports to is a passive recipient of it even if they have input or feedback on it. But that cascades downward: in manager culture, the mobile roadmap is owned by the mobile PM, the internal tools roadmap is owned by the internal tools PM, and so on. They all buy into manager culture, where autonomy is viewed as a defining aspect of their impact and importance, and to take away that autonomy is to undermine them and risk losing them (“micromanaging, which is bad”).
This same thing happens with marketing. Budgets get set. Agencies get hired. Branding and creative campaigns get developed and show up on the doorstep of the CEO hundreds of thousands of dollars deep. In engineering. In customer support. In finance (we have to do this, because the forecast cycle requires it; we can’t do that, because we don’t have the budget).
In founder culture, the founder gets down and dirty in the roadmapping process. They will give direct feedback on how a customer issue is routinely handled, or a design choice, or a creative campaign. Or a technical standard - Gates and Jobs both famously did this incisively and decisively. I’m no huge fan of Zuck, but it’s clear how much involvement he has with product and design for example. He famously bought Instagram because he wanted to, and understood its importance to facebook’s future, not because a strategy team identified it and a corp dev team engaged and investment banker to analyze and negotiate it. Mark Pincus was like this at Zynga too- ask anyone who was there.
Why is this important? Because people all the way down the organization don’t usually have the same nuanced understanding of the product, the market, the company strategy, the positioning, as you do. They will make decisions that optimize their subsystem but are sub optimal to the system. I had a customer support manager recently ask me if he could move a set of things that was causing a lot of load on his team to our law firm. The law firm of course charges 10-30xx per hour what a customer support agent makes. Even if you do a good job evangelizing the company mission and hiring non-mercenaries and whatnot, again and again and again you will see people wanting to “professionalize” their teams in ways that add more process, slow things down, and attenuate impact.
So If you let your company get into manager mode, you really lose control of the boat. And if you try to operate in founder mode after hiring a bunch of managers, they pissed because they don’t want to be micromanaged. But if they were crushing it, you wouldn’t need to.
I think the best founders are able to navigate this dynamic effectively, whether that’s by being able to effectively make a jump to a more delegated model, or building a team that can leverage their strengths without snuffing their hands-on involvement, or taking back the wheel at the right time.
A good counter example I can think of is Yahoo, when Jerry Yang took back over after Terry Semel retired. Manager culture had deeply set in there, and was not reversible despite Jerry’s good efforts and some great executives who were aligned to it. (And yes, the big, Steve Jobs inspired, “fix the company retreat” they did was literally “VP’s and up”.). As someone who worked there, was not a VP, but likely would have been in a “top contributing employees” cull by different measures, it was extremely painful to experience.
I would note that it takes a lot of energy to sustain this mode and be a leader through it, or to make changes in this direction to course correct.
To be fair, I think this is acknowledged by Paul in this essay. He treats Founder mode as something that isn't well studied, isn't well defined, but has a vibe to it that people familiar with it would recognize immediately. The essay struck me as more of a call to action to study this style of company running and to acknowledge the "manager mode" as a possibly destructive model if relied on as the sole mode a company is run by.
He was implicitly referring to what Chesky did recently at AirBnB (personal involvement in lower-level decisions eg product design in his case as it’s his forte).
He does clarify, in the linked reply, that he didn't provide examples or go into detail about what exactly "founder mode" is or how it should be done because it needs a lot of research and would more or less require a whole book to explain.
It's a "generative culture" according to Westrum's organisational typology. Recognising it as that makes it clear that a) there is actually something to this, b) PG's being less novel here than he thinks, and c) everyone here needs to read more.
Objectively, original post had little to no details in it to link it to any kind of typology.
Sidenote: the fact that someone came up with another typology or classificator does not mean they know how to predict the outcomes in any way. It is the same exact MBTI style of pseudo-science which polluted tech and business world for decades. For someone urging others to read more, you’ve surely read something about the hindsight bias?[0]
My ex colleague is still fuming after several years about case where professional manager decided to program parser that we decided was 8 story points. If this manager would have been founder it would probably have been normal stuff about founder spearheading initiative.
As our company scaled, 7-figure ARR, the common refrain was it was time we hire a VP of Sales to help make our sales process "repeatable, scalable, blah blah".
So we tried twice over 3 years with 2 different VP's. Both paid $300-400k and sourced through recruiters who charged $75k in recruiter fees. So we were getting what any VC would consider cream of the crop VP of Sales.
Yet both of them failed spectacularly. We went from closing business every month to (both times) sales stalling and flat lining.
The 2 VP's were smart people and they had seen success at prior companies similar to ours in size and scale and maturity (and deal size, sales cycle length, B2B, etc). So what was the problem?
Simply put, what worked at their prior companies didn't work at our company. And both of the VP's wanted to push us the founders as far away from the sales group as possible so the VP's could retain full autonomy with their team. Onboarding both VP's was a miserable experience because, both times, they clearly weren't interested in internalizing the hundreds of failed lessons (and success stories) that had gotten us to this point. So after a while we saw the whole sales team slide back into old behaviors and tactics that we as founders knew didn't work (because we'd already learned those lessons).
By the time founders get to the point of bringing in outside management, they've probably been running the company for many years. The fatal problem is when founders bring in outside managers who don't bother to understand the tactics the founders used to get the company to the stage its at, and instead they come in wanting to replicate experiences they had a prior companies, because that's what's comfortable for them.
Unfortunately, on the flip side, promoting from within isn't a much better option, either. I've seen it happen multiple times where extremely high performing IC's are promoted into Lead or Manager roles, and the company 1) immediately loses a high performer because they're now focussed on managing people which is usually a totally different skillset than whatever made them a high performing IC, and 2) the manager fizzles out after 1-2 years because they aren't practiced at basic management tactics like delegation, quit, and go back to an IC position at another company.
It's incredibly difficult to convert an IC into a manager. And it's also incredibly challenging to (successfully) bring in a manager who wasn't first an IC at your company.
"Founder Mode" to me is figuring out how to scale your company in a way that doesn't lose the "magic sauce" that got the team to where it is. "Magic sauce" being culture, processes, systems, tactics, lessons, knowledge, etc that founders used to get the company to where it is before needing managers to scale people.
"Founder led sales" ... "Founder led engineering" ... "Founder led marketing" are all dirty words when talking to VC's, PE, potential acquirers, because anything "Founder-led" isn't scalable and relies on the founder working at the company to work. Maybe "Founder mode" is a stage of a company where the focus is figuring out how to scale "Founder led X" beyond what has historically been seen as practical.
Really interesting response. So if hiring from the outside isn't ideal and promoting from within isn't ideal, what is the solution? Going back 3 years ago, what would you have done instead?
What ended up working was hiring a Sales Manager instead of a VP.
The lesser title attracted candidates who were happy to take direction from founders, and the founder still stays in the “head of sales” seat.
Once the sales manager is ramped up, grow as much as possible then bring a VP to oversee it all, but with a larger team already in place it will be harder for them to mess up what’s working.
It's making decisions, in the weeds, across functional boundaries and some form of micromanaging.
He's right. I've worked in small and large companies and started one. The whole idea of hiring smart people and letting them do a good job is total nonsense. It doesn't even make sense in theory, let alone practice.
1. Be the ultimate judge of what excellence means to the company. Enforce this directly, in direct communication with people doing both a good and a bad job, instead of rigidly relying on chain of command.
2. Break the rules if the rules are stupid. Pay excellent people out of band, for example.
3. Directly fire people for incompetence and accept that some of them will sue you. Whatever. Rather pay the settlement than pay the cultural cost of keeping losers around.
4. Don't accept that some things are too detailed for the CEO to understand. Either the person can explain it to you or you have the holy authority to overrule them.
Ultimately, founder mode is about confidence, courage, and competence. It only works if you're good, and founders who are weak will obviously kill their companies if they try to do this.
So act wisely.
Edit: this is being downvoted, which I think proves the contrarian point PG is making.
And to be honest this hn comment section scares me, as it feels like people are discussing Paul’s new clothes without actually voicing out what they are talking about.
What the hell is “Founder mode”, exactly?