Searching for Founder Mode

Founder mode exists, but it can only be found by going inside, not by observing successful founders from the outside.

This week everyone seems to have forwarded the essay on Founder Mode by Paul Graham to each other. I agree with much of it, but I think there’s one point that he is wrong about.

What is founder mode?

First, it’s a short piece very much worth reading, but if you’re short on time, here’s the gist of it. Paul argues that the way founders run their startups is materially different from how managers run companies that employ them:

In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from the dismay of founders who've tried it, and the success of their attempts to escape from it.

I agree. This seems to be true based on observing wildly successful founders running their companies in idiosyncratic ways, e.g. founder of Patagonia Yvon Chouinard or founder of Apple Steve Jobs.

Although my own company, Makers, hasn’t nearly achieved the heights of Patagonia or Apple (yet!), as a CEO I was doing unconventional things like telling the team to set their own salaries and it had its benefits.

The founder mode seems to exist and be useful even though there are plenty of examples of founders messing up by trying unconventional management approaches.

The founder mode isn’t perfect, but it seems to be a thing and is likely a better way to run companies for founders.

But can we find it?

However, I think that Paul is wrong that we can figure it out:

There are as far as I know no books specifically about founder mode. Business schools don't know it exists. 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. I hope in a few years founder mode will be as well understood as manager mode.

There are no books about it not because business schools haven’t noticed that many successful companies are run in founder mode, but because it’s not generalisable.

There are plenty of books about it, written by specific founders about specific companies:

• Let My People Go Surfing about Yvon Chouinard running Patagonia

• Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace about Ricardo Semler running Semco

• Rework about Jason Fried and DHH running Basecamp

• and countless others.

The only thing in common about these books is that these founders had the audacity to trust their judgement about how things should be done and be themselves. The actual specifics are wildly different, and that’s why I don’t share Paul Graham’s hope that “in a few years founder mode will be as well understood as manager mode”.

The founder mode is not universal; it is understood on an individual level, not as a shared practice. To find it, each founder needs to go inside.

Artisans and artists

I think the difference between professional managers and founders is a bit like the difference between artisans and artists.

Artisans’ mastery lies in perfecting their craft. Like artisans, professional managers can learn a lot by studying the management theory and practice: how to delegate, how to communicate, how to set goals, how to hold people accountable, etc.

Artists, like artisans, also need to master the basic skills. But unlike artisans, they are trying to find the right expression to their creative impulse. And this expression will be unique to them.

This is why the are great artists but no manual on how to become one. The art created by Banksy, Marina Abramović, Picasso or Ai Weiwei is dramatically different and unique. Great artists become great by first learning the basics and then charting their own path.

Founders are like artists in this regard. They need to know the basics of management, but, unlike managers, they will likely be better off trusting their own intuition of what kind of company they want to build and how to run it.

That’s why the founder mode looks very different for Steve Jobs, Yvon Chouinard and Brian Chesky. There can be no manual.

On becoming yourself

One the best books on leadership I know is On Becoming a Leader by Warren Bennis. Its genius core message? Be yourself:

First and foremost, find out what it is you’re about, and be that. Be what you are, and don’t lose it.

It’s very hard to be who we are, because it doesn’t seem to be what anyone wants.

...once you recognize, or admit, that your primary goal is to fully express yourself, you will find the means to achieve the rest of your goals…

To be authentic is literally to be your own author, to discover your own native energies and desires, and then to find your own way of acting on them.

As far as I can tell, this is the essence of founder mode: not finding out a secret manual that no one thought to write yet, but picking up an old manual and following it where it leads, as Bennis wrote decades ago:

Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself, it is precisely that simple and it is also that difficult.¹

To finish on a self-serving note, this is also why, I believe, founders who want to become better managers will get more from coaching than from management training, unless they’re a first-time manager and need to cover the basics.

Management training can help them become better managers, but it is coaching — a non-directive, reflective practice — that’s meant to help them find their own unique founder mode and become more themselves.

1. For Buddhists here, this quote reminds me a lot of “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form” line from the Heart Sutra. This statement is simultaneously nonsensical and enigmatic, offering profound wisdom to those willing to understand it. Likewise, Bennis’s words “becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself” seem trite at first, but they conceal both lifetime of work to become yourself and the fruits of that labour.