Founder Mode

Both PG's post and your point about his experience creating a rare perspective are spot on. While I think PG's "Founder Mode" concept needs further exploration, he's on to something I never saw in the typical HBR-type literature. It mirrors my experience being a startup founder acquired into a decades-old F500 tech company.

As a senior executive it took me quite a while to figure out how this huge, well run company really worked and I always felt my understanding of the important ways it was different from my startup were unique and distinct from the standard business writing. I hope this Founder Mode distinction is developed further because there really is something new and valuable here. As you've pointed out, the problem is only a few hundred people have experienced the journey from successful tech startup founder to senior exec inside a decades-old, >5K employee global tech giant.

For me it was profoundly eye-opening while being both fascinating and alienating. Once inside the giant, I saw many things not working (of course), but I also saw other things which definitely seemed to kind of work but in entirely 'upside-down' ways from my prior experience. It's like the systems (and ways of thinking behind them) had evolved differently in an alternate universe. They were much more complex, less efficient and strangely opaque. But these bizarre constructions did scale and were (mostly) working, while being unpredictably unreliable in mysterious ways. When asked to run them, or worse, improve/fix them I found myself completely lost due to their alien anatomy. I couldn't fix them because, to me, they were "not even wrong". Yet to everyone around me, they just seemed normal.

Systems like this were the source of that simultaneous fascination and alienation. It caused me to question my core premises about 'how things work', which I'd formed over decades of experience across three successful startups, evoking feelings similar to PG's reference gas lighting. This experience repeated itself several times and the profound feeling of alien "otherness" is the strangest thing I ever experienced in business. Even now, I find it difficult to convey a true sense of. And it's the one thing I've never come across anyone talking about until PG's Founder Mode.

To be clear, I'm not talking about the usual nonsensical org chart stuff one finds in lurking in most big orgs. This is about the deeper structures and dynamics that make complex processes fundamentally work in balanced, self-correcting ways. What I've always called "The right people, in the right process, with the right feedbacks." Echoing PG's post, in my experience, these essential structures can only be fully understood vertically across levels from high to low. And across degrees of granularity from the macro to the micro. As a founder in my startup, instantly jumping between these scales while building or fixing such a system, is when I'd often hear push back from employees or even board members who came from traditional business backgrounds. While obvious to me, they just didn't seem able to see how these disparate things were connected in a deeper, crucially important way. Perhaps being able to see things in this dimension and determine which are essential to the business, is a key part of Founder Mode.

What was the point of the article? Don't delegate important decisions to the people below you, except for when you do? What PG is suggesting is a founder should understand all problem spaces the company exists in, better than any other employee in any position, in perpetuity, because no-one could possibly understand anything better than the founder. If you want labour to scale, you need to let people actually do their job.