Climate Founder Mode

There is a lot of chatter on “founder mode” and what that means for building and operating organizations effectively. I’ve had the fortune of?being both a founder, organically growing the business at Sust Global , and being part of a rapidly scaling engineering organization while at Planet. There are some factors that make operating as a climate founder counterintuitive.?

“So founder mode will be more complicated than manager mode. But it will also work better.” - Paul Graham, Founder Mode.

Here’s what “founder mode” means to me (*):

1. Staying multidisciplinary: Climate is inherently multidisciplinary. We need a “mixture of experts” to accelerate the delivery and commercialization of innovation. A founder's role is to keep raising the bar as the lowest common denominator across the disciplines and to foster deep collaboration across these experts on the team.
2. Sensing business context: During our time scaling Sust Global, we have had tailwinds turn into headwinds. An example is the wave of ESGfrom being the driver of the climate data solution buying process in 2020 to the anti-ESG sentiments prevalent in 2023. We have also had headwinds turn into tailwinds. An example is the use of AI modeling in climate risk. When introducing our methods in 2020, the user community found them different from pure physical based modeling. However, with the advent and widespread use of AI in other domains of their operations,? consumers of climate data and analytics now see the greater potential of using AI for climate risk modeling. The founder needs to have good sensing on the current state of market awareness and positioning, while holding true to the long term innovation the venture is bringing to market. They need to distill this sensing across their team to enable a common baseline of knowledge.
3. Scaling with details: As much as a founder desires for being involved in details, there is a point where they need to trust the team around them and work with them to scale the business. Empowering team? members to operate with total ownership and autonomy is the way that has worked for me. I love exploring geospatial datasets, testing modeling hypotheses and code-reviewing new product features, but have learned to switch from being the bottleneck to being the enabler when bringing? innovation to our customers. That does not mean delegating critical decisions. It means incorporating trust and context in the day-to-day operations of the team. This allows for easy decisions to be made quickly and hard decisions to be understood.
4. Hiring for growth: Growth hinges on the strategic investment in people and cultivation of opportunities for your people to grow. Each of us has ascended to our current roles because someone believed in our potential earlier in our careers. In my hiring practices, I emphasize the importance of drive, ownership and adaptability. The foundation of any successful operation is its people; investing in them and fostering collaboration and collective growth is crucial for scaling effectively.

I agree with Paul Graham that founder mode(*) will be more complicated than manager mode. But it is also better when bringing critical innovations to a fast evolving market.

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(*) While this a short summary of my thoughts on founder mode, it is my no means a comprehensive list. I've tried to limit myself to the key items that command attention from a founder operating in data/analytics/SaaS/software tools for climate adaptation. From a Founder/CTO perspective, there are number of topics such as team design, founder-led onboarding and founder-led sales that deserve airtime but that I didn't get to.