Founder Mode and 10 Years of Hard Things

It's been 10 years since Ben Horowitz published "The Hard Things about Hard Things", so I decided to re-read it. A few of the anecdotal details have not aged so well (does anyone still remember or care about Netscape? how many people have even heard of Loudcloud?) but the core of the experiences and rawness of the feelings are just as relevant today as they were then -- if not more so.

The book is primarily aimed at startup founders. Rather than romanticize entrepreneurship talking about rainbows and unicorns, the author gets really vulnerable, sharing his internal emotional and psychological turmoil. Here's a short selection of what Ben calls The Struggle:

when people ask you why you don’t quit and you don’t know the answer

when you wonder why you started the company in the first place

when everybody thinks you are an idiot, but nobody will fire you

when you are surrounded by people and you are all alone

when you want the pain to stop

Then Paul Graham dropped his write up on what he calls Founder Mode. He distinguishes between two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Common wisdom is to run in manager mode: "hire good people and give them room to do their jobs". Scaling works by managing purely through their direct reports. However, according to PG:

there are things founders can do that managers can't, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because it is.

And then it hit me: most of those things founders can do are the hard things Ben wrote about years ago. This is all very real for me and many startup founders who are navigating their companies through the ups and downs, zigs and zags, emotional highs and deep despair that are part of building and scaling a company.

The burden carried by a founder/CEO can be crippling at times. It's also one of the most rewarding personal and professional experiences. While these two ideas appear to be at odds with each other, they are in fact closely related to extreme ownership as a leader. When the team succeeds, you can be proud of what they have achieved; when they fail, it's all your fault. There's no other fallback. The buck stops here.

Both PG's founder mode and Ben Horowitz's wartime CEO call out the need to delve into the operational details, transcending hierarchies or protocol. While some may view this as micro-managing, that's only when seen through the lens of the more traditional manager mode/peacetime CEO style of leadership. Most people, especially those who have worked at more mature and slower-moving organizations, only have experience operating in manager mode. This is what it is taught in business schools, management training courses, and books by management consultants, but it won't work at most startups.

I know, because I've tried it.

As a founder, I enjoy being in the details of product execution, marketing messaging, deal structure, demos, recruiting, etc. In the early days of the company, I was doing all of that and more. However, as I started to scale the company, hiring some smart and dedicated people, I felt this required a different approach: I wanted to give them room. My team started trying to "protect" me from the execution details, which was seen as necessary to avoid becoming a bottleneck.

However, after trying this for a few quarters, something didn't feel right. Pulling back from the day-to-day details only created more issues of alignment, execution and quality, requiring me to intervene and provide corrections. This took much more time, effort and friction than getting it right from the start. Since then, I have adjusted my approach: while still very much relying on my team to drive and contribute, I don't shy away from providing very specific direction, whether sharing a new product concept, driving a new seemingly out-of-reach demo until we get it working or making prompt hiring decisions when I am confident it is the right call, instead of going through a long committee process.

This in turn has helped people across the team become more closely-connected, not just to me but to each other. One of our company values is what we call "work fluid", which means that we work collaboratively across the company and adapt to the terrain. However, as a company grows, it's natural for people to organize into teams, and pretty soon they mostly just talk to others on the same team and don't know, and perhaps don't care, what others are doing. By working across teams and across levels, I'm able to make connections and enable conversations that otherwise may not have occurred.

This is not to say that we don't need leadership. Much to the contrary, we continue to grow the team with amazing leaders, engineers, customer success managers, and more. As we grow, I'm being more explicit about whether I'm providing direction or suggestions; I'm setting more clear expectations and accountability; and pushing to drive faster decision-making with less rework and backtracking.

In light of this increased intensity, it's even more important to spend time together as a team and share some fun experiences together. While few things are better than showing value to customers, it's also important to slow down and enjoy time together for a bit before jumping back in. Given my obsession with pizza, which rivals Ben's obssession with hip-hop, I made some Neapolitan pizza from scratch for the team, teaching some of them to sling dough and nerding out about doppio 0 flour and hydration levels.

It's still hard, though. While I may not have gone through the same emotional turmoil related by Ben Horowitz in his book (in his own words, when "self-doubt becomes self-hatred"), the responsibility of carrying the company on my shoulders as founder/CEO is intense. I'm very lucky to be surrounded by a supportive team that helps me carry that weight, united in the goal of making the company a massive success with a positive, global impact on humanity.