Founder Mode

The Nugget

Founder Mode, as opposed to traditional management strategies, is crucial for successfully scaling a startup. Following conventional advice often results in failure, but adopting founder-specific methods has proven effective.

Make it stick

💡 Traditional advice: "Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs."
🚀 "Founder Mode" involves more hands-on, personal engagement in company details.
💎 Steve Jobs' unique retreats: Annual meetings with the 100 most important people, regardless of rank.
🔄 "Skip-level" meetings: Founders directly engaging beyond just their direct reports.

Many founders received and followed advice to run their growing companies with a hands-off management approach, only to find this strategy led to failure.
Success stories like Airbnb have shown that traditional "manager mode" is less effective for founders scaling their businesses.

Founder Mode involves founders taking a more hands-on, direct approach in managing their companies, akin to how they initially ran their startups.
This mode breaks typical management rules, such as the rigid hierarchy of communication and delegation.

Steve Jobs' management at Apple included unique strategies like annual retreats with the 100 most impactful employees, illustrating a more personalized and engaged leadership style.
Such tactics helped maintain the innovative and cohesive environment of a startup, even as the company scaled.

There's a current lack of structured knowledge about Founder Mode, but observing successful startups reveals its effectiveness.
Over time, more founders' experiments will likely map out the principles and practices that define Founder Mode.

As the notion of Founder Mode becomes more established, it could be misused by founders who refuse to delegate appropriately or by managers attempting to mimic founder behaviors without the same context or effectiveness.

"Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it’s described that way, doesn’t it? Except in practice, it often turns out to mean: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground."
"There are things founders can do that managers can’t, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because it is."
"Whatever founder mode consists of, it’s pretty clear that it’s going to break the principle that the CEO should engage with the company only via his or her direct reports."
"Can you imagine the force of will it would take to do this at the average company? And yet imagine how useful such a thing could be."
"Imagine what they'll do once we can tell them how to run their companies like Steve Jobs instead of John Sculley."

This summary contains AI-generated information and may have important inaccuracies or omissions.