As a leadership coach, I couldn’t resist chiming in with my thoughts about Paul Graham’s “founder mode” essay.
1) Props to Graham. I’ve seen criticism that “founder mode” is vague and ill-defined and not practical advice. I don’t think that was his goal in writing the essay. From my perspective, he was massively successful – he wrote something that propagated widely that makes founders feel like he “gets” them and understands their perspective. That leads to more founders applying to Y Combinator which directly leads to $$$ for him. If you read it as a sales brochure and not practical advice, it makes a lot more sense.
2) I think his idea of what managers do is based on a straw man version of bad managers. It’s worth remembering that most founders (including Graham!) have never had a good manager, so don’t actually know what good management looks like. Effective managers would never let their reports work completely unsupervised with no accountability.
3) Founders do have several advantages over hired managers: they have an implicit tacit knowledge of their business across functional areas, they set the culture and priorities through their behaviors and principles, and they are biased towards action and tend to be more resourceful because they have no job description and a lot of incentive to win. But each of those characteristics can be replicated if they design an intentional and conscious hiring and onboarding process for incoming leaders.
4) “Founder mode” will absolutely be used by inexperienced founders to manage their companies poorly. “Founder’s syndrome” is already a thing where founders hold onto what initially brought them success long after it is the right thing for the company.
In the end, I don’t think “founder mode” and “manager mode” are meaningful labels despite Paul Graham’s viral essay. They are both simplistic approximations of what it takes to be an effective leader. Founders can learn from professional managers. Managers can learn from founders. In both cases, look for evidence that the person giving advice is believable, and has actually achieved success using that advice, not just read it in a book or seen somebody else do it. Plus, it’s rare for advice to apply unconditionally; understand in what context that advice worked, and figure out how to apply that advice to your own context.
More words and thoughts in my longer write-up at https://lnkd.in/gvh5Z6JH