For many startup founders, ‘Founder Mode’ is the term we’ve been looking for

A recent talk by Airbnb’s cofounder Brian Chesky has been making waves across the startup landscape this month, all revolving around one exciting new term: Founder Mode. Up until recently, there was no convenient explainer for Founder Mode, but many have felt its effects or impact for decades. To better explain what Founder Mode exemplifies, it’s useful to start by understanding its opposite: Manager Mode.??

For a long time, Manager Mode has been the way countless startups have been run as they scale into larger businesses. It’s the idea that, when a company reaches a certain size or success level, once-involved leaders begin to adopt a delegation-centric, hands-off management style. It runs nicely alongside the mantra of “hire good people and the work will take care of itself”, but it seems that doing so does not always reap the rewards Manager Mode promises.?

In fact, Chesky and many others (including Steve Jobs) have felt that, when founders begin to ease into Manager Mode, the company suffers as a result. Instead, they believe in adopting Founder Mode, which is the art of remaining close to the details and to the people behind them, even as your company scales.?

In a now widely-shared article by Paul Graham of Y-combinator, he talks about the reasoning behind why Manager Mode often doesn’t work for founders. He says, “What [founders] were being told was how to run a company you hadn't founded — how to run a company if you're merely a professional manager. But…there are things founders can do that managers can't, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because it is.”

Essentially, if you take responsibilities like problem-solving, creative ideation and risk-taking decisions away from founders, you lose what makes them so uniquely useful and powerful to the company. Having them sitting behind a desk away from the noise is not where they typically thrive, or what got them there in the first place.?

For many startups - like us here at Remotify - having Founder Mode coined is of huge importance, because it helps others to understand the differences between staying where our talents lie, and negative terms like “micromanaging”. As a female-founded business, this is especially important because Founder Mode is a much harder dance for women, who are more likely to get canceled or reprimanded for exhibiting Founder Mode than their male counterparts. As Bumble’s founder Whitney Wolfe Herd says, “[I was] in founder mode for 10 years and got attacked for it every single day.”??????

The more we learn about Founder Mode, the easier it will be for us to exhibit it, no matter who we are, what our gender is or what we look like. The results have continued to show us that many founders do their best work when they continue to roll up their sleeves and remain a part of the everyday running of the business. And who are we to argue with these results?

At Remotify, we work with companies and individuals to create amazing places to work, no matter where you are in the world. Want to find out more about how we do it? Book a call with a member of our friendly team today.