When you assign a person to a problem (hr policy, infrastructure scaling, new UX capability) they will treat that problem as most important, and if then they break it down a certain way and delegate parts those people will do the same with their respective parts. Like a game of telephone eventually what's actually important and what people think is important will drift apart, and before you know it a lot of people are working and doing stuff that doesn't really matter or is even counter productive.

A founder who can hold the whole business in their head and inspects the whole company at all levels continuously will spot and challenge/correct these drifts.

I think it was from Creativity Inc I read that Steve Jobs would challenge engineers about things and if the engineer stood up to him and made their case and it made sense and fit into the vision Steve would commend them and give them the autonomy, at least for that decision/project, but if the engineer folded or couldn't make a case for why it was the right decision he would steamroll them.

So I think founder mode is basically inspecting and challenging the company at all levels to maximize progress towards realizing a vision, and only people who are great visionaries and can also understand and judge the vision-alignment of unlimited micro decisions across many disciplines are able to operate this way.

But in general I think it's clear: founder mode here means having strong opinions about all parts of the company. Maybe it's a technical founder telling salespeople what they should emphasise in their sales pitches, or a nontechnical founder giving directions on choice of technical architecture. (And I think either of those examples would provoke different reactions in most people here).

A founder can wield this to effect changes that would be nearly impossible without it. In this sense, a founder can solve some problems in every part of the organization that no manager can. If a founder delegates everything to managers, or cannot identify problems best addressed with this founder's tool, then you are setting up managers to be ineffective in some situations that could have been solved by the founder stepping in. I think this is also part of what makes founder-led companies different generally. Professional managers do not have this tool at their disposal to solve organizational problems.

It requires judiciously picking when and where to leverage this power. Applying it unnecessarily will have the effect of disempowering your managers, and now you have a new organizational problem.

I’m sad about that because I was very interested in the title.

To some extent, the concept must remain vague because its meaning will vary from one company to another. Typically, there are one or two critical aspects that are most important for a startup or company, and the founder must be involved in those areas in a way that conflicts with the usual corporate structure or hierarchy.

Anyways, this is how I understood it.

It could be that the moral authority stems from having as much of a full picture as a single person can have over the entire lifecycle of the company, but I think a lot is also just the effect of "I got you here."

I'm glad pg named this effect, since I've talked about the related phenomenon for CTOs with many people.

This same thing happens with marketing. Budgets get set. Agencies get hired. Branding and creative campaigns get developed and show up on the doorstep of the CEO hundreds of thousands of dollars deep. In engineering. In customer support. In finance (we have to do this, because the forecast cycle requires it; we can’t do that, because we don’t have the budget).

In founder culture, the founder gets down and dirty in the roadmapping process. They will give direct feedback on how a customer issue is routinely handled, or a design choice, or a creative campaign. Or a technical standard - Gates and Jobs both famously did this incisively and decisively. I’m no huge fan of Zuck, but it’s clear how much involvement he has with product and design for example. He famously bought Instagram because he wanted to, and understood its importance to facebook’s future, not because a strategy team identified it and a corp dev team engaged and investment banker to analyze and negotiate it. Mark Pincus was like this at Zynga too- ask anyone who was there.

Why is this important? Because people all the way down the organization don’t usually have the same nuanced understanding of the product, the market, the company strategy, the positioning, as you do. They will make decisions that optimize their subsystem but are sub optimal to the system. I had a customer support manager recently ask me if he could move a set of things that was causing a lot of load on his team to our law firm. The law firm of course charges 10-30xx per hour what a customer support agent makes. Even if you do a good job evangelizing the company mission and hiring non-mercenaries and whatnot, again and again and again you will see people wanting to “professionalize” their teams in ways that add more process, slow things down, and attenuate impact.

So If you let your company get into manager mode, you really lose control of the boat. And if you try to operate in founder mode after hiring a bunch of managers, they pissed because they don’t want to be micromanaged. But if they were crushing it, you wouldn’t need to.

I think the best founders are able to navigate this dynamic effectively, whether that’s by being able to effectively make a jump to a more delegated model, or building a team that can leverage their strengths without snuffing their hands-on involvement, or taking back the wheel at the right time.

A good counter example I can think of is Yahoo, when Jerry Yang took back over after Terry Semel retired. Manager culture had deeply set in there, and was not reversible despite Jerry’s good efforts and some great executives who were aligned to it. (And yes, the big, Steve Jobs inspired, “fix the company retreat” they did was literally “VP’s and up”.). As someone who worked there, was not a VP, but likely would have been in a “top contributing employees” cull by different measures, it was extremely painful to experience.

I would note that it takes a lot of energy to sustain this mode and be a leader through it, or to make changes in this direction to course correct.

He does clarify, in the linked reply, that he didn't provide examples or go into detail about what exactly "founder mode" is or how it should be done because it needs a lot of research and would more or less require a whole book to explain.

So we tried twice over 3 years with 2 different VP's. Both paid $300-400k and sourced through recruiters who charged $75k in recruiter fees. So we were getting what any VC would consider cream of the crop VP of Sales.

Yet both of them failed spectacularly. We went from closing business every month to (both times) sales stalling and flat lining.

The 2 VP's were smart people and they had seen success at prior companies similar to ours in size and scale and maturity (and deal size, sales cycle length, B2B, etc). So what was the problem?

Simply put, what worked at their prior companies didn't work at our company. And both of the VP's wanted to push us the founders as far away from the sales group as possible so the VP's could retain full autonomy with their team. Onboarding both VP's was a miserable experience because, both times, they clearly weren't interested in internalizing the hundreds of failed lessons (and success stories) that had gotten us to this point. So after a while we saw the whole sales team slide back into old behaviors and tactics that we as founders knew didn't work (because we'd already learned those lessons).

By the time founders get to the point of bringing in outside management, they've probably been running the company for many years. The fatal problem is when founders bring in outside managers who don't bother to understand the tactics the founders used to get the company to the stage its at, and instead they come in wanting to replicate experiences they had a prior companies, because that's what's comfortable for them.

Unfortunately, on the flip side, promoting from within isn't a much better option, either. I've seen it happen multiple times where extremely high performing IC's are promoted into Lead or Manager roles, and the company 1) immediately loses a high performer because they're now focussed on managing people which is usually a totally different skillset than whatever made them a high performing IC, and 2) the manager fizzles out after 1-2 years because they aren't practiced at basic management tactics like delegation, quit, and go back to an IC position at another company.

It's incredibly difficult to convert an IC into a manager. And it's also incredibly challenging to (successfully) bring in a manager who wasn't first an IC at your company.

"Founder Mode" to me is figuring out how to scale your company in a way that doesn't lose the "magic sauce" that got the team to where it is. "Magic sauce" being culture, processes, systems, tactics, lessons, knowledge, etc that founders used to get the company to where it is before needing managers to scale people.

"Founder led sales" ... "Founder led engineering" ... "Founder led marketing" are all dirty words when talking to VC's, PE, potential acquirers, because anything "Founder-led" isn't scalable and relies on the founder working at the company to work. Maybe "Founder mode" is a stage of a company where the focus is figuring out how to scale "Founder led X" beyond what has historically been seen as practical.

He's right. I've worked in small and large companies and started one. The whole idea of hiring smart people and letting them do a good job is total nonsense. It doesn't even make sense in theory, let alone practice.

2. Break the rules if the rules are stupid. Pay excellent people out of band, for example.

3. Directly fire people for incompetence and accept that some of them will sue you. Whatever. Rather pay the settlement than pay the cultural cost of keeping losers around.

4. Don't accept that some things are too detailed for the CEO to understand. Either the person can explain it to you or you have the holy authority to overrule them.

Ultimately, founder mode is about confidence, courage, and competence. It only works if you're good, and founders who are weak will obviously kill their companies if they try to do this.

So act wisely.

Edit: this is being downvoted, which I think proves the contrarian point PG is making.