Founder Mode Embodies the Tech Leadership Crisis
I woke up yesterday to breathless discussion of Paul Graham’s Founder Mode essay — including positive coverage in the New York Times — and now I’m so, so angry.
Why that reaction? I’ve been increasingly worried about a crisis of leadership in tech: we accept and even revere ineffective, tyrannical founders and without any evidence their approach is successful — despite evidence that their approach is damaging.
Founder Mode does contain some useful advice. But it takes our leadership crisis to another level, in two ways. It diminishes everyone who isn’t a founder — that is, almost everyone at every company — by implying some sort of “founder class” of better people. And it denies founders the resources they need to grow and the expertise of the people they hire by insisting that both are dangerous and only they can chart the course for their teams.
I’m hopeful my points here will stand on their own, but I’ll note I’ve founded two companies, raised a couple rounds of funding, and sold one company to Google. I’ll probably found another at some point. I’m a product manager, designer, full-stack engineer, and senior leader who prides himself on both being hands-on and giving people autonomy.
Here’s the crux of the problem:
[They say] hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it’s described that way, doesn’t it? Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground…VCs who haven’t been founders themselves don’t know how founders should run companies, and C-level execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the world.
So everyone who isn’t a founder is a “professional faker” or “skillful liar.” Trust your gut and don’t listen to them. This is one of the great paradoxes of modern tech: we brand ourselves as “data-driven,” but we dismiss the data when we don’t like it, and especially for people stuff. In this case, the evidence (books, articles, and entire academic journals) supports investing in leadership as a path to better outcomes. As one example, here’s Ken Blanchard in Leading at a Higher Level:
Does empowerment work in the real world? You bet it does! Several researchers have found that when people are empowered, their organizations benefit overall. For example, Edward Lawler found that when people are given more control and responsibility, their companies achieve a greater return on sales…
In all the material I’ve read on this topic, I’ve yet to see an exception carved out for founders. (Though founders are sometimes unusual in taking the job without an explicit interest in leadership, meaning they need more support.)
What’s amazing in Graham’s post is just how blatant he is — how explicitly he dismisses everyone who isn’t a founder as inadequate. It’s no wonder I see founders blaming the failure of their own plans on the supposed “B Players” trying to execute them.
The Straw Man
Graham begins:
As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised [Brian Chesky] that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale. Their advice could be optimistically summarized as “hire good people and give them room to do their jobs.” He followed this advice and the results were disastrous. So he had to figure out a better way on his own, which he did partly by studying how Steve Jobs ran Apple.
Yep, I could see the results being disastrous if that were the only advice he received. In much the same way that if you’re trying to build a house, “Buy some wood, nail it together, and put a roof on it,” might be disastrous. But if you were trying to build a house, you’d at least watch a couple YouTube videos before getting started.
And the same is true with leadership. That advice isn’t wrong; it’s just simplistic. A better (but still simplified) version: “Figure out how to hire great people, and then create the structures and processes that allow them to do their jobs effectively while working toward a common goal.” That, at least, hints at the work of leadership. I’d bet Chesky is doing that work, but it isn’t reflected in Graham’s post.
And of course you don’t have to figure these things out on your own. Get a coach. Read one of the many good books on leadership. Take a training. Read Harvard Business Review. Listen to podcasts. Invest in yourself as a leader. If you still want to forge your own path, then at least you’ll be doing it in an informed way.
One more thing: it feels suspect to me that people constantly use Steve Jobs as an example when they argue for top-down control. If it’s such a successful strategy, shouldn’t we have a lot more data points? (It’s also not as good a data point as people think. For instance, Apple has done remarkably well under Tim Cook, who is not the founder.)
Bad Advice and More Straw Men
Throughout the post, Graham counters legitimately bad advice on how to lead companies. But it’s straw men again: oversimplified versions of good advice. In fact the tendency of founders to oversimplify advice, and the negative impact of doing so, has been studied. It’s natural to reject something given a reductionist version of it:
The way managers are taught to run companies seems to be like modular design in the sense that you treat subtrees of the org chart as black boxes.
If you haven’t invested in yourself as leader, you might reach that conclusion. But it’s not advice you’ll find in any reputable book or article on management. Effective leadership is about staying involved in the work of those subtrees in ways that improve outcomes and empower people.
But [people will tell you] don’t get involved in the details…That would be micromanaging them, which is bad.
Micromanagement is bad. But getting into the details is great, even necessary. It only becomes micromanagement when you insist on dictating the details, especially over the objections of people with more context and domain knowledge.
Founders feel like they’re being gaslit from both sides — by the people telling them they have to run their companies like managers, and by the people working for them when they do. Usually when everyone around you disagrees with you, your default assumption should be that you’re mistaken. But this is one of the rare exceptions. VCs who haven’t been founders themselves don’t know how founders should run companies, and C-level execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the world.
I’m not sure how to counter this, because it rests on a sort of religious faith. When everyone disagrees with you, and this one guy says to ignore them because but doesn’t offer any specifics…well, maybe dig a little deeper before you act. Learning to synthesize advice — not to accept or reject it reflexively but to evaluate and combine with your own instincts — is a critical leadership skill.
The Magic Founder
An ongoing frustration I have with tech — another drop in the “ignore the data when we don’t like it” bucket — is the insistence that founders are a special, rarefied breed of human to which the rules don’t apply. This is odd: most founders are also non-founders, many non-founders aspire to be founders, and any founder whose company is acquired is suddenly a non-founder (and, apparently, a “skillful liar” or “professional faker”).
Take any startup past Series B. It should be possible to write a job description for its CEO — one that’s specific about skills and expected outcomes. Wouldn’t it be weird if the last sentence in that were, “But if you’re the founder, feel free to ignore all of that?”
Good Advice
There’s actually excellent advice in or adjacent to Graham’s article, and it’s a shame people will miss it for what’s lying on top of it:
Stay hands-on. I wasn’t privy to Chesky’s talk, but perhaps this was his point; certainly it’s how the New York Times interpreted it. Leaders who disengage — who interpret “give people autonomy” as “stay out of the work” — do so at their peril, because they stop steering the company. But the definition of hands-on changes as you grow: from writing code and pushing pixels to steering strategy and coordinating priorities. The latter may not sound hands-on, but to do it effectively one must be in touch with the team, product, and market. If that’s not hands-on enough for you — if you long for the days spent heads-down — well, that’s what hobby projects are for.
Hire good people and give them structure to do their best and grow. This sounds similar to the straw-man advice, but the bits in italics are critical. You’re not just giving your teams space and washing your hands of their work. You’re figuring out, team by team and individual by individual, how to catalyze and empower them; how to bring your expertise together with theirs; and how to help them grow even when they were experienced to begin with. That’s difficult, time-consuming, hands-on work.
(Before I published this, a founder reviewing it said, “This may be the most radical thing you’re saying…I don’t think anyone thinks about this,” while a leadership expert said, “This is pretty basic leadership 101…is it really not trickling into tech?”)
Do skip-levels. Yes! Go out and start doing them right now! How else are you going to get a sense for how your managers are doing? I also like Andy Grove’s framing in Only the Paranoid Survive: he talks about “Cassandras:” people within your organization who’ll fill in your picture of how things are going, and in particular help you anticipate the need for strategic shifts. Talk to your team. The biggest risk when people start being “more hands-on” is that this won’t happen.
And near the end, Graham writes:
Obviously founders can’t keep running a 2000 person company the way they ran it when it had 20. There’s going to have to be some amount of delegation. Where the borders of autonomy end up, and how sharp they are, will probably vary from company to company. They’ll even vary from time to time within the same company, as managers earn trust. So founder mode will be more complicated than manager mode. But it will also work better. We already know that from the examples of individual founders groping their way toward it.
I agree wholeheartedly. But what he’s describing isn’t some mysterious new “founder mode” thing. It’s leadership. You can learn how to do it from books and stuff.
Dark Matter
Beyond that, Graham’s post doesn’t end up offering much specific:
There are as far as I know no books specifically about founder mode…All we have so far are the experiments of individual founders who’ve been figuring it out for themselves. But now that we know what we’re looking for, we can search for it.
So…we don’t know what it is, how to do it, who’s doing it, or what its outcomes are, but it’s the right way to operate. It’s the dark matter of the tech industry.
Which takes me from angry to sad: founding a company is incredibly difficult and isolating; founders can use all the help they can get. And help is out there: you needn’t pursue some mythical “founder mode” all by yourself, or isolate yourself even further from your team. Lean on the expertise and resources around you, and forge your leadership perspective on that foundation.
I mentioned the existence of reading material to help train leaders who want to learn. I maintain a list of my recommendations, and of course welcome new ones.
