What Founder Mode Actually Means
Paul Graham’s “Founder Mode” post has swept through the startup world like a tornado and has become an instant classic. The reason it resonated so deeply with founders is that anyone who’s ever tried to scale a company carries deep scars from all those VP hires that didn’t work out. The chaos left behind, the cleanup, the quarters (sometimes years) lost.
Recruiting people who can do the job better than a founder is extremely hard. Having started the company from scratch, spoken to hundreds of prospects early on, and been involved in every little decision early on, founders know so much more about the company’s product, mission and customers that even best executives can’t compete. What’s more, no hire will ever be as committed or work as hard as a founder.
PG argues that founders are uniquely positioned to drive a company’s success by staying hands-on, even as it grows. Indeed, if we look at our portfolio, with very few exceptions, the most successful companies are those still driven by their founders 10+ years after the start.
And yet, the take-away from PG’s post can’t be that founders should keep doing everything themselves. I don’t believe PG intends this to be the take-away (see his footnotes ), but my concern is that many people will draw the wrong conclusion. To build a large company, you have to assemble an amazing team and hire leaders that you can trust with large amounts of responsibility. I’m not saying founders should ever completely remove themselves from Sales or Product, but they can’t micromanage every department either.
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So how do you find that balance? I’ve been discussing the topic with Michael Wolfe in the last few days, and he just published a great post based on his 30 years of startup experience. In our view, Founder Mode means:
What do you think?
Principal Engineer at Apple
1 天前If the founder mode is operated with transparency, as exemplified by Jensen Huang’s approach (https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1deb0ta/nvidia_ceo_jensen_huang_has_a_no_oneonone/), its effectiveness is certain. However, if it involves numerous one-on-one meetings, I assume it may lead to significant challenges that overshadow its potential benefits.
Partner @ F1V | Forbes 30u30 | pitch me: [email protected] | I do not invest in Web3.0
2 个月I like this breakdown. A lot of people seemed to misunderstand PG’s essay and took it as a recommendation to micromanage people. This breakdown concludes every discussion about founder mode that happened in the last weeks well
Gründer Venta (YCS23) - Ich probiere neue Wege in der Kundenakquise
2 个月I've been thinking about founders mode and it somehow reminds me very much of the management style of Ferdinand Piech. When he was running Audi at the early 2000s he apparently was involved in every decision. There's a rumor, that when they showed him an early prototype of the new A3, he wen't around it and destroyed every little thing that he didn't like, e.g. the exterior mirrors. It was the most successful era for Audi though.
guiding innovations to market success in manufacturing
2 个月Thanks for the clarification, already first people began misundestanding it. I would also add that often founders learned how to make tough decisions, like very rare people in the manager mode are able to do.
Serial entrepreneur, created more than 300 million Euro in exit value. Turnarounds, Coach for Entrepreneurs
2 个月On point, as always.