Please. Ignore all this Founder Mode B.S.

You might have heard a lot about this concept of Founder Mode recently. (If you haven’t, count yourself lucky, delete this email, and get back to work. You’re living right!)

The term grew from a post by Paul Graham about a talk that Brian Chesky gave at a Y-Combinator event. (Again, if you don’t know who those people are or what Y-Combinator is, you’re doing just fine.)

This debate is not relevant to your business

In case you’ve missed my tone so far, I don’t think anyone reading this email should pay any attention to this concept or the hype that has followed it.

First of all, this advice is not for you. Unless you are the CEO of a venture-funded, unicorn company, the whole discussion is about a problem you don’t have.

Founder Mode is a system Paul Graham inferred from observing founders like Chesky (who founded AirBnB) and other high-growth internet companies that Paul funded. Again, that’s not you.

But further, the whole concept of Founder Mode implies a false dichotomy.

Paul describes Manager Mode as how consultants and business schools train people to run companies, “like modular design in the sense that you treat subtrees of the org chart as black boxes. You tell your direct reports what to do, and it’s up to them to figure out how. But you don’t get involved in the details of what they do. That would be micromanaging them, which is bad.”

Maybe they are just bad managers?

There’s a HUGE gulf between treating your departments as black boxes and micromanaging! This isn’t a binary choice.

There’s a way to delegate authority and autonomy while still maintaining accountability and getting information directly from the people most involved in the work! No one should treat their departments like “black boxes,” but neither should they second-guess their direct reports and show up in low-level product meetings when they are CEO of a 2000-person company.

Paul says, “[Founder Mode] is going to break the principle that the CEO should engage with the company only via his or her direct reports.”

Again, who’s advocating for that? The best CEO I ever worked for spent 50% of his time influencing his direct reports, 35% working with clients and industry influencers, and 15% cultivating trusted sources from deeper into the organization. He sought out potential managers and directors to build a relationship with them, adding to the mentoring they were (or weren’t) getting from their boss and, in the process, picking up some “on the ground” feedback on critical projects and initiatives.

I’m constantly frustrated about how business thought and culture have been defined as venture-funded tech companies. They represent <1% of the value created in the US economy, yet they absorb 90% of the cultural interest. (Statistics totally made up, but directionally correct.)

As my CEO mentor used to say, “My job is to introduce interesting problems to smart people and get them out of their way.” Whether you are a founder or a manager, that is sound advice.