Founder Mode, take 2 (or: Life is always more complex)

Paul Graham’s Founder Mode essay got a lot of comments on social media today.

Some quick thoughts on the subject (which might be subject to change based on feedback).

I think the core idea is solid, i.e. successful founder CEOs can get better results by operating in a hands-on and active rather than delegated and passive way. Which might include skip-layer meetings, global backlogs or whatever other tools are useful to drive focus on the most important things.

However, I added the prefix successful. Because a company is not run in either Founder Mode or Manager Mode. I think the level of execution matters a lot and would think about it in a 2×2 matrix.

	Founder Mode	Manager Mode
Great Execution
Bad to Medium Execution

The examples of Steve Jobs with his second act at Apple or Brian Chesky at Airbnb would be Great Execution.

Steve Jobs first act at Apple would probably be Bad to Medium Execution. Same person, same company, but at a different time in both the individual’s and company’s life.

Building and managing a company is very hard, which leads to Bad to Medium Execution on Founder Mode being where most founders operate. Not on Great.

When a startup has reached sufficient scale, a great executing manager likely does better than a bad to medium executing founder. Unless the founder can improve his/her execution to Great. A Hall of Fame example would be Sataya Nadella ất Microsoft, who is not a founder, but has executed in Manager Mode as good as is humanly possible.

The way Paul Graham writes about founders dealing with Manager Mode, I get the sense they have ended up in a situation when they feel they are not doing what they want to do, which lead to not setting the right strategy/targets and following up, being too hands-off, etc. I.e. execution is at Bad to Medium level, not at Great level.

Managing organizations is not easy. But it is not quite as simple as Founders are always great (even if I think it is hard to overstate founders’ value to a startup) and Managers are always bad.