Founder Mode

“Founder mode is for Every founder. I like to say to founders, you went and became a founder to bet on yourself, and now you don't, you shouldn't abdicate that to somebody else, to your board or your investors.”

“That's to me the real founder mode is, can you have the courage to tell your team and your investors that this isn't it?”

“You, as a founder, owe it to yourself to control your own destiny and take half the valuation if it's all of the control.”

“Founder mode is just about, to me, it's about tours of duty depending on what's on fire inside the company or like what's the most important thing and what you're best at. You just go crush. You just have to go you know, kill whatever that challenge is. And it…”

“I think people are basically born good founders or said differently. It's innate. You don't have to learn how to be a good founder. No one is born a good CEO, and the job of CEO is completely counterintuitive, and almost all of your intuition about what to do …”

“Founders were over-delegating their companies to these professional managers. I'm not disparaging them, but they were detaching themselves, and they were being managed, rather than managing the company. And it was really about not apologizing about how you wan…”

“This notion that great leadership is hiring great people and trust them to know what to do. Well, how do you know they're great if you're not auditing what they're doing? And you actually want to start hands-on under control and give ground grudgingly.”

“By the way, I think founder mode is going to be The only way to operate in the age of AI. If you're a giant professional CEO, I think you can operate in a founder mode, but if you're like, you know, risk averse, you want to be incremental, those types of peopl…”

“The whole notion of founder mode is an extreme reaction to extreme bloat that got created in most Silicon Valley companies over the last decade.”

“Companies that are like solely executing through the judgment of individual probably aren't going to be able to scale to be truly great companies.”

“Founder mode. I think a lot of people have taken to never hire anybody with experience. And that's also bad advice in that look, somebody who knows how to do something can really accelerate your thing.”

“I think they're, you know, what we get into here is this double standard where if you're in founder mode as a woman, I mean, I was just talking to my friends about this last night, and they work At a crypto startup, and they do experience that. They're conside…”

“You want to build a scaled leadership team. You have to be willing to have them make boneheaded decisions. And that's really, really hard, especially if we're quote in founder mode, driving all the decisions.”

“If The founder and the CEO does not exercise agency, you know, then it's actually a political game, and then you have sort of fiefdoms that are fighting it out with one another, and the leader is not there, then you enter the situation where, ah, neither the l…”

“One thing that was like striking that missing from that essay is the fact like, you know, like it was like, well, there's a manager runs a company one way and a founder runs a company in one way. It's like, no, like the founder runs it based on the personality…”

“It turns out, you know, you don't have to be the founder to try to run the founder mode playbook.”

“So what he's referring to by Founder Mode is that we're told that we can run our company by hiring great people and get outside of their way. Senior, great people. That sounds lovely in theory, in practice, because we're founders and we're very particular abou…”

“I'm anti-founder mode. I believe in delegation. I think when you are telling people how to do their job, that is an indication that it's not a, not necessarily a problem with you. It could just be that that person is not right for that job.”

“I think it's just a shortcut for describing effective people. I think anyone can be that.”

“It's just that founder mode, the founder run company, I think this has an easier time existing because people dislike the people who are Pumping heat into a thing, you know, people fight them, people politic them out. And if the boss is like this, boss can pro…”

“I read Paul's blog. I feel like he was describing just good management hygiene, and, but then he called it founder mode. I feel like digging into details, making sure you're, you trust, but you verify is what all good CEOs must do.”

“One, I think you need really good executives and you don't want to do the founder mode thing unless something's broken. You know, like you kind of want, cause you can't do it everywhere. Like you need people to help you run the company and like, and so you wan…”

“The winning formula is founder mode and going direct. And that's why if you try to make fun of a founder for posting a lot on X just check yourself, because some of the best ever are doing that.”

“I think for One billion in revenue company, it's actually, it's not it's not that established in a way. You need to get to a critical mass.”

“It's not manager mode is bad. It's the greatest CEOs know when to calibrate which one is needed.”

“Intuition comes from, in my point of view, A deep understanding of self and the capacity to get quiet and be well resourced. Meaning you've slept well and you've eaten well and you have enough love in your world. And I think what founder mode can confuse is my…”

“I think founder mode is kind of this Rorschach test. It's sort of like ill-specified, so it's sort of like whatever you know, it is whatever you see it. I think it's also like a destination you get to more than like a state of mind, right? So if you think abou…”

“So I think when a founder's in founder mode, what they are doing, and if they're doing it well, what they're doing is really deeply understanding the business and then figuring out when to use their power as a founder to either tweak things and send something …”

“Now, I think the way to use that effectively as a head of product is to recognize that they have that power to figure out how to use that power to get the things done that you know are best for the company. So I always think about, like, I have all the people …”

“I think it's often easy as a leader to say, I'm not going to roll up my sleeves and get into the details of the business or ask a lot of detailed questions about the business because you want to empower people and make them successful. And what I've found is t…”

“My worry about the founder mode, and everything that gets pulled down to a very short piece like that, is that I think it's going to be used and abused in all sorts of different ways, because there's so much context that goes into every single word in there, l…”

“I've already been on the receiving end of a few people quoting, quoting Founder Mode to disagree with things that we're doing, I was doing, so.”

“Founder mode does not work for sales. It does not work for inside sales.”

“Founder mode is really good if you have a founder who's right a lot. If they're not, God bless that company.”

“Every founder that I've worked with or for has operated in one way or another in founder mode.”

“I don't think it's going to lead to, like, a dramatic increase in bad behavior.”

“One of the things that defines this idea of founder mode is skipping the organizational structure. And going directly to the people that do the work. And you know, this is famously how Steve Jobs did it with the top 100 at Apple. It's how Elon, I think, seems …”