The online whiteboard of Kristofer Palmvik
I would PREFER the enduring legacy of both “founder mode” and Brian Chesky’s “The Art of Hiring” to be one that moves the industry forward in material ways, and not one that further entrenches the Silicon Valley cult of the founder, Great Man of History, 10x engineer Lone Ranger superhero John Galt type bullshit that has dogged our heels for decades. And there is some decent material to work with here.
Differently from what Graham believes, this approach is well known to business schools as poor, dysfunctional management, and the alternative to that is of course good management. If you are a founder, that’s harder though, because it requires empowering teams in doing there job, and putting in place ways of working that enable people to make those difficult decisions and fix those problems. Without you. Like you would do. Better than you.
Founder Mode is a joke. It’s for the weak. You want the truth? Founder Mode is pure delusion—a comfortable lie for those too scared to go all in. You want to level up? This is Ultra Founder Mode, where the intensity never drops, the pressure never lets up, and excuses are obliterated.
Micromanagement is bad. But getting into the details is great, even necessary. It only becomes micromanagement when you insist on dictating the details, especially over the objections of people with more context and domain knowledge.
You need a clear strategy that explains how to focus the company to reach this vision. How do we prioritize? Without this, companies devolve into siloed fiefdoms. Product, marketing, sales, and engineering all stop working together. They focus only on their areas.
Founder mode does not mean hands-off delegation, but it also does not mean micro-managing. It is a manifestation of the passion for the customer and the problems to be solved, with the goal of collaborating closely with product teams to discover and deliver winning solutions.
In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from the dismay of founders who've tried it, and the success of their attempts to escape from it.