Paul Graham, founder of the popular accelerator Y Combinator, coined a new term this week that has taken over social media: founder mode.
In an article released on September 1 and published on Labor Day weekend, Graham separates “founder mode” from the more common “manager mode” route by noting key differences in management styles and organizational structure. Graham X’s post has over 21 million views at press time.
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Founder mode means that the CEO interacts with employees throughout the organization, not just their direct reports. A startup, even when it grows into a large company, is less hierarchical; The CEO can hold “skip” meetings with employees, for example. Graham gave a real-world example of Steve Jobs running an annual vacation for the people he thought were the 100 most important people at Apple – regardless of where they were at the business level.
Manager mode, on the other hand, is inactive and involves sending other people. Founders can grow companies and run them successfully without switching to manager mode, Graham said.
“Hire the right people and give them the space to do their jobs,” Graham wrote. “Sounds good when explained that way, doesn’t it? Without working, judging from the report of the founder after the founder, what this often turns out to mean: hire professional fakers and let them run the company down.”
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Graham gave the example of Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, who tried to follow the conventional wisdom of “manager mode” to hire the right people and let them do their jobs.
“The results were disastrous,” Graham wrote.
Chesky had to turn to a different management style of the “founder” and explained in an interview last year that founders have many advantages over managers: They manage all parts of the process of building a company, from the beginning to the end; They have built a company, to rebuild it; and they have permission to rename the company or make major changes.
Here they are: @bchesky in inventor mode.
Three reasons why founders are different from managers:
1. Being a biological parent
2. Full consent to make the change
3. Knowing how to rebuild the company pic.twitter.com/VhuQ70B8FK— Yana Welinder (@yanatweets) September 2, 2024
In the past few days since Graham released his story, the social media world has begun to explore what it means in funny and insightful ways. One post made a comparison between micromanaging and founder mode.
founder mode pic.twitter.com/LWOlaFq4UJ
— ST (@seyitaylor) September 2, 2024
Another post from female founders answered the question: Can women be in founder mode too?
Chesky wrote in X earlier this week that female founders have been contacting him since Graham published an article on how they can run their companies the same way as male founders.
“This needs to change,” he wrote.
Remember when female founders did founder mode and they all got cancelled?
– Sara Mauskopf (@sm) September 3, 2024
It happened to me first — headlines portraying me as a “toxic leader” when I had to make the same decisions, often unpopular, that my male peers made without criticism.
For them, it’s called Founder’s Mode, and it’s celebrated (properly named! For its sales! And trademarks… https://t.co/rF0IM1huy3
— Sophia Amoruso 3.0 (@sophiaamoruso) September 5, 2024
