Reflecting on Founder Mode, from the excellent Oxide and Friends podcast, responds to Paul Graham’s Founder Mode, where he posits that founders have a unique ability to eschew conventional wisdom and succeed.
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.
The hosts note that the “manager mode” label is almost inherently derogatory, and that it really downplays the value of expertise. I agree: I think it was lazy of Graham to leave this label in after what must have been several rounds of edits (see the list of high profile entrepreneurs at the bottom who read early draft versions). Choosing a different name for the opposite of founder mode, and trying to understand the value that leadership in this mode provides, would have been more empathetic and ultimately more truth-seeking. “Expert mode”, perhaps. A less pejorative label doesn’t prevent talking about the negative aspects or potentials for failure in this mode, of course, but it is a check against rounding the entire side of the dichotomy as always bad or undesirable.
It also reminded me of one of my favorite posts from Scott Alexander called All Debates are Bravery Debates, an introspection about how to evaluate advice that sounds offensive or outrageous. Trivially put, this depends on who it’s being presented to, but the post shows how nontrivial it is to take a neutral view on this by discussing whether some very polarizing topics are actually good or bad: selfish/selfless moral ideals (Randian objectivism), taking responsibility for failure vs acknowledging limitations (accountability), stronger/weaker mores regarding sexual boundaries (feminism). Advice on topics like these can be incendiary because we naturally assume that everyone else is working from the same experiences that shaped us (typical mind fallacy), but like everything, what advice to listen to depends on your starting point.
The same must be true of founder mode and whatever we call its opposite. Graham’s advice is tautologically aimed at people who need to hear it, but that doesn’t mean that everyone needs to hear it. Perhaps Graham himself doesn’t know that, or perhaps he’s surprised it wasn’t implied, but whether he knows it or not is beside the point of his essay: it will have done its job if the right founders see it and persuaded by it. What the bravery debates post tells us is that we won’t be able to predict who those right founders are without knowing something about them and their companies.