Founder Mode

A founder (or strong leader) habitually has a clear vision of where they want to be tomorrow that is not obvious from looking at the company today.

The process of fulfilling that vision requires open exploration, a willingness to go places along the way they didn’t expect, and to continue looking ahead.

It isn’t constrained by current products, markets or customers. The memory of how the current company came from something seemingly much less remains fresh.

It is much more of an idiosyncratic winding journey, but potentially more impactful, than iteratively looking for paths that bump numbers.

It's not founder mode or manager mode. I think it is just about effective management.

When starting up, the founder needs to (1) know what should be done, (2) be able to do it themself, and (3) do it and confirmed it's done. When scaling up, the founder still needs to (1) know what should be done, (2') know who are able to do it, and (3') arrange for those to do it and confirm it's done.

What is called manager mode is just a failure in either (1), (2) or (3). And what is called founder mode is just trying to remedy such failures by exerting themself instead of fixing the structure, thus, also not effective.

Not sure if I agree with the sentiment here or not, I'll need to ponder it longer, but just wanted to say that I worked at a large company that did the "CEO with non-manager conversation" thing. At Advanced Micro Devices, in the late 80's and early 90's, both the CEO and the COO would have lunches with random employees from the lower ranks, I assume to get stories from outside their bubble.

AMD was successful in some ways in those days, and unsuccessful in others, so I'm not sure what conclusion to draw here, except that it wasn't so unique for Steve Jobs to have contact with the lower ranks in order to get feedback from outside his bubble.

Cofounder of a well-known startup accelerator and venture capital firm tells us the truth: we (still) don't know why companies are successful and how they are managed best ...

I don’t know, consider me skeptical. My last company was a start-up with a solid product-market fit and lots of building interest from prospective customers. We had a CEO and CTO, both cofounders, who were operating in what it sounds like is being described as “founder mode” here. Very hands on and opinionated on implementation details would be the polite way of describing it. The less kind version is that they were meddling micromanagers, out of their depth in the areas they forcefully inserted themselves, and frequently subject to delusions of grandeur. A bunch of product and technical decisions were made that many of us saw as being fatally flawed and pushed back against and were overruled. We were saddled with dead end product implementations that failed to meet what the founders had envisioned and came with crushing tech debt. We went from being positioned to win what was clearly a newly emerging category, to scrambling to put out fires and being in constant crisis mode. All the while CEO would send out think-pieces to the team on his take on why our efforts were failing to achieve his vision, while never once recognizing that the things the team had warned him about were being realized exactly as predicted. Employee churn was high, as people were fired out of nowhere for “poor performance”, to be replaced by new hires that the CEO was very high on, only for them to be crushed by the same factors that had crushed everyone else. Eventually the wheels came off the wagon and the company failed. Someone is going to build a successful version of that product, but it won’t be us.

Paul Graham here claims that C-level types are all professional liars and that the ideas behind standard management strategy is worthless. I agree. Where I disagree is the idea that founders are any different. They are just a different flavor of the same thing. This concept of founders mode is just another nice-sounding theory that can never be proved, that makes for captivating talks and blog posts and eventually management books but will fail to produce anything with any kind of consistency. It’s the yet another cargo-cult trend for the group desperate to prove they are the next Steve Jobs.

I’m not even sure I buy into the Steve Jobs mythos. Every random process will have statistical outliers for no other reason than randomness, but hey become canonized and their words and lives are studied like scripture and we try to divine the path to emulate them. Many of us understand that top performing hedge fund managers are statistical flukes that are getting lucky rather than systemically beating the market. But we hold out against the idea that startups and founders are a similarly chaotic system. I wonder if it’s because this is a forum for startups and not hedge funds?