Founder Mode: A sign you have yet to, or failed to, hire the right people and build the right culture.

Why founder-mode is a cop out as you grow your business.

Silicon Valley is in an uproar about a new concept everybody’s talking about called “founder mode”.

This idea of founder mode stems from frustration — many founders, including Brian Chesky (CEO of Airbnb), share the feeling that they hire managers, as they are told to do to scale their business, but these managers do not drive the business in the same way they would as a founder.

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, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground. — Paul Graham

The solution, according to Paul Graham and Brian Chesky, is to go back to founder mode, where the founder manages every important decision in the company rather than delegating it to others.

I think it’s a big, fat cop-out.

It’s clear that the problem exists, but going back to founder mode, as a long-term strategy, is a failure of leadership. There are many other ways to solve this problem without reverting to “If you want it done right, better do it yourself.”

Here are a few examples:

• Maybe you just spend more time hiring amazing (non-fakers) people who share your vision and ambition?
• Maybe you should apply methods like Amazon Dive Deep and the rest of this amazing Amazon Leadership Principals?
• Maybe build a scalable culture of founder mentality within your company?

I am not saying this to be contrarian, I am saying this from experience of seeing it work:

1. I worked with amazing people, in the early days of Google, who had a founder mentality, deep understanding, and internal drive who achieved amazing outcomes.
2. Me and the rest of the Slack platform team were inspired to achieve great product velocity, by Stewart Butterfield culture of “We’re all in this together”.
3. I experienced first hand the Day One and Single Threaded Owner principals at Amazon and saw their effectiveness.

The essence of “founder mode,” or diving deep, is a fantastic concept. I see successful founders use it all the time. They find places where things aren’t working, deep-dive into them, fix them, make sure they’re staffed with the right people, and move on. This is a best practice for any founder before they reach product-market fit and scalable sales motion.

Founder mode might also be beneficial for war-time CEOs, when there is a monumental market shift or a crisis that affects your company.

So why is founder mode not a good strategy for the long run? The answer is that it is not sustainable as it is based on a single point of failure (AKA the founder) and not scalable as it is limited by the bandwidth of a single person (AKA the founder).

Another negative aspect of perpetual founder mode is that it can create a toxic ego trip (not uncommon in Silicon Valley) for your startup. Founders who want everything done exactly the way they want it will attract drones, not creative people. Talented people understand that leadership sometimes needs to be in founder mode, but if it persists for too long, they feel strangled and leave.

A great company is one where every manager, leader, and employee is in founder mode when needed. It’s a Day One culture, it’s a Dive Deep culture, it’s a “We’re all in this together” culture.

So, don’t take the cop-out route and the ego trip that comes with “I can do it all.” Instead, do the hard thing — hire amazing, driven people and build a culture that outlasts you.