‘Founder mode’ and not ‘manager mode’: Why this startup guru want tech CEOs to change the way they work – Times of India

Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham has ignited a debate in Silicon Valley with a provocative essay challenging long-held beliefs about startup management. The piece, published Sunday, argues that conventional wisdom on scaling companies is fundamentally flawed and introduces the concept of “founder mode” as an alternative to traditional “manager mode.”
Graham’s essay was inspired by a recent talk from Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, who described how following standard advice led to “disastrous” results at his company.”As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised him that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale,” Graham wrote. “Their advice could be optimistically summarised as ‘hire good people and give them room to do their jobs.’ He followed this advice and the results were disastrous.”

“Founder mode” vs “manager mode”

The crux of Graham’s argument is that founders are often given advice suited for professional managers, not company creators. “What they were being told was how to run a company you hadn’t founded—how to run a company if you’re merely a professional manager,” he explained. “But this m.o. is so much less effective that to founders it feels broken.”
Graham contends that the standard “manager mode” approach, which emphasises delegation and avoiding micromanagement, often leads to dire consequences. “What this often means is to hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground,” he wrote bluntly.
Instead, Graham advocates for a “founder mode” of leadership, though he admits its exact principles are still being defined. He predicts it will involve more direct engagement between CEOs and employees at all levels. “Whatever founder mode consists of, it’s pretty clear that it’s going to break the principle that the CEO should engage with the company only via his or her direct reports,” Graham wrote. “‘Skip-level’ meetings will become the norm instead of a practice so unusual that there’s a name for it.”
The essay resonates strongly with Chesky’s recent comments on leadership. In a TED talk, Chesky described feeling “gaslit” by advisors and employees urging traditional management approaches. “I felt like I was going crazy,” Chesky said. “Everyone was telling me to do things that felt wrong, and when I did them, they didn’t work.”
Graham echoes this sentiment, writing, “Founders feel like they’re being gaslit. 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.”

Steve Jobs, Jensen Huang, and others who are leading their companies in “founder mode”

Steve Jobs, whose approach Chesky studied, is often cited as a prime example. Other notable practitioners that have been talked about are Jensen Huang of Nvidia, who reportedly maintains 60 direct reports;; Mark Zuckerberg of Meta; and Sam Altman of OpenAI.
Outside the tech sector, Howard Schultz, who built Starbucks into a global powerhouse, is also mentioned as embodying this hands-on leadership style.
Dan Rose, a former executive at Amazon and Meta, added to the list, noting that “Jeff Bezos and Zuckerberg were both micro-managers, deep in the details of the product and business. They never set expectations of autonomy, and they fired anyone who resisted their oversight.”
“Worth reading,” reacts Elon Musk, Shopify CEO and others approve of Graham’s idea of “founder mode,” while some still want to stick with “manager mode’
The essay has sparked intense debate in startup circles. Serial entrepreneur Howard Lerman posted that founders were “absolutely fired up” by Graham’s ideas, adding: “Building a company is all I know how to do, and all I ever want to do.”
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk endorsed Graham’s essay as “worth reading” on social media platform X. Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke also expressed approval of the approach.
However, not everyone in the tech world is fully convinced. Jessica Lessin, founder of The Information, pointed out that even highly involved founders like Jobs relied on skilled managers such as Tim Cook to oversee crucial aspects of their businesses, suggesting a more nuanced approach might be necessary.
Graham concludes his essay with a bold prediction: “Once we figure out what [founder mode] is, we’ll find that a number of individual founders were already most of the way there—except that in doing what they did they were regarded by many as eccentric or worse.”