What is "founder mode"?

something jeff bezos always warned against was the "narrative fallacy" - for one to believe so strongly in a compelling story that they dont stop for data.

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.

Replacing founders with professional managers was the norm in SV until the mid 2000s and the Zuck era began. See for example Google with Schmidt.

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.

An interesting read. I've been a Monzo customer ever since the sign-up process was "come to the office and we'll give you your card and help you get the Beta version of the app installed" and it's been interesting, exciting (and sad, in some ways) to see it grow and morph into what it is today.

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.

> Instead, I believe that great leaders have to be able to dig into the details, have an incredibly high bar for quality, and ultimately do great IC work themselves. Great managers have to manage the work - they should primarily be responsible for quality and speed of output. Managing people must be secondary to managing the product.

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.

> At Monzo, we experimented with some pretty wacky management structures at times. There was a period when our middle managers were basically just responsible for “pastoral care” of each employee. They were not connected at all with the output that the ICs were producing. It was totally insane and overlapped with our period of lowest productivity by far.

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.

Thanks for sharing! Good take.

There is also this checklist I used to use for more "practical references" https://www.craftengineer.com/the-founder-mode-used-by-brian...

>I believe that great leaders have to be able to dig into the details, have an incredibly high bar for quality, and ultimately do great IC work themselves. Great managers have to manage the work - they should primarily be responsible for quality and speed of output. Managing people must be secondary to managing the product.

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..' )

Somehow I feel that Paul Graham has contaminated the startup discourse with his "Founder Mode" essay.

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.

Its forcing employees to create value, when they really just want to collect compensation

Programmers love to name things, and then argue about the name.

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.

Unlike PG's half-baked founder mode essay, this article is more complete in describing what behaviors are successful during scaling. It also matches my experience when Netflix was scaling up the streaming business in the 2010-2016 era.

> 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.

Replace managers with AI

To equity-holders, it's code for the obsession that makes founders work extra-hard to please the financiers. To employees, it's code for being an abusive asshole.

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.

Feels like I am taking crazy pills when I read about this stuff. Like 1500 words that boil down to "make sure you're paying attention to whether or not people are doing a good job".

I am glad he is calling out the C-levels for their propensity to lie and 'manage up'. This is a character trait that needs to be annihilated. We should not be filtering for what is effectively psychopathy.

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.

Fuck "founder mode". Work in "fuck off" mode.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41545495

https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1fgv248/fuck_founder_...

Its a grindset.

Founder mode is funny. There's definitely some companies that benefit and there's others that don't, and it's not clear which is which. But the term "founder mode" is so funny that we now use it in my group of friends (of which the majority have started software companies worth $xxx million) as an analogue for "going ham".

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.

Founder mode = drop out of Berkeley and copy paste open source code?

I wonder if 'founder mode' is the antithesis to Agile as getting shit done is against the manifesto (in practice).