Paul Graham, the founder of Y-Combinator, posted an essay this weekend entitled, “Founder Mode.”
I read a lot of tweets about this essay before I actually clicked through to read the essay itself. Y-Combinator being the Silicon Valley force that it is, a lot of the tweets were sycophantic, which in turn primed me to dislike the essay.
Once I read the essay, however, I found it pretty humble and on-point, although not as earth-shattering as its promoters proclaim.
The essay starts off with a reference to a talk by Airbnb founder & CEO Brian Chesky. The essay’s praise for this talk (which as far as I know was behind closed doors and maybe unrecorded) is over-the-top.
But then the essay moves on with a lot more humility and a nice dose of concision.
Graham writes that a lot of founders have trouble scaling. They hire management teams and defer to those teams and the strategy doesn’t work out. If the founders are smart, they stop deferring to the managers, and step back into “founder mode.”
Fair enough.
The insights of the essay, I think, are two-fold. One is that non-founder executives tend be very good at “managing up,” and maybe not so good at actually managing.
C-level execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the world.
Graham’s other insight is that not much is known about this “founder mode.”
There are as far as I know no books specifically about founder mode…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.
The first insight, about the perils of executives who are only good at managing up, strikes me as really important, although not original to Graham. I’ve worked in start-ups for most of my career and have seen and observed this. Perhaps I have even written about it. I’m confident many people noticed it before me.
That said, I think surprisingly few founders and CEOs and even start-up employees are aware of the phenomenon. If Paul Graham throws the force of his influence behind it, I think that would be to the benefit of the entire start-up ecosystem.
The second insight, about the dearth of knowledge on “founder mode” is perhaps more original and also more nebulous. Does this “founder mode” really exist? What does it entail? Graham is pretty open that he doesn’t yet know.
Perhaps, as he writes, knowing that we’re even looking for it will bring it into focus.
David Silver 