It’s interesting that Graham doesn’t seem to say what Founder Mode looks like in any capacity, other than referring to a few outlier founders.

Less than one quarter of companies that go public do so with their original CEO.

Most people would say that indicates Founder Mode doesn’t generally work as companies scale.

It looks like Graham feels that it’s because too many founders listen to common wisdom and eventually get pushed out / leave?

I honestly don’t buy it. In order to scale, companies have to learn how to operationalize more and more processes. This fundamentally looks like “hiring people and giving them the space and authority to operate.”

I feel like his entire post could have been reframed as “just as VCs know there are relatively few excellent founders and identifying them is hard, there are similarly few excellent executives and identifying them is also hard.”