Founder Mode: A Liar’s Perspective

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If you work in tech, there is no doubt you have stumbled into a conversation in the last week about Paul Graham’s article, Founder Mode, based on a presentation by Brian Chesky, one of the founders and CEO of Airbnb. (If you haven’t read it, go read it before you read this or it won’t make sense…)

I have spent the last 10 years as the right-hand or sounding board to a lot of founders. I’ve worked for a few extraordinary founders — like Mark Zuckerberg and Bret Taylor — and spent significant time with a few others that I would categorize as extraordinary. On paper, I am the quintessential “manager” in Paul’s article — someone that founders hire to help them figure out how to build and scale their company. That also means that according to his article, there’s a significant chance that I am a Talented Liar. 

I’ll admit that on the first couple of reads, that article sent me – and most other operators (I will use this term generically to cover “people who work for founders”) I talked to – into their “feels” because, at its worst or most oversimplified, the concept of Founder Mode feels like it minimizes the work of every single other person inside a company other than the founder. Particularly when paired with characterizing the people who work for Founders as liars. 

The simple reality from every operator I’ve talked to is this: companies are as likely to be damaged or destroyed by the behavior of founders as they are to be made successful by them. 

But the most interesting thing I discovered after days of thinking about this and talking about it with other operators and Glue People is it turns out that I violently agree with Brian Chesky and Paul Graham. 

The most extraordinary companies in technology are run by intense, brilliant founders. Those companies are built in the image of their founder and are most successful when the company learns how to act like the founder at scale – how to think, build, and ship the way the founder would. 

To be clear, when I say extraordinary companies, I am thinking of ones that started at zero and have gotten to $50B or $100B in revenue. The Apples, Googles, Facebooks, etc. The most interesting conversation here is not about how to run an average, random $10m company successfully, but rather what makes the difference between a $100M revenue company and a $100B company.

The truth is extraordinary founders are not common. They are not once-in-a-generation, but they are also not everywhere. Mediocre founders are everywhere. And terrible founders are much more common than extraordinary ones. (I would argue that the distribution of founders from terrible to extraordinary probably looks similar to the distribution of execs from liars to exceptional operators…) 

I also truly believe that extraordinary founders are made not born. The most extraordinary founders I have spent time with are some % DNA and some % aggressive, voracious learning and self-improvement. They surround themselves with people they can learn from, including on their teams. I wish more founders understood the work, learning, and intense journey that it takes to become an extraordinary founder. 

In more detail, here is what I believe about Founder Mode: 

1) The most extraordinary companies in the world are run by intense, brilliant founders. And they are run... intensely. Anyone who has been part of building one of these companies would say that the founder's strong hand and intensity were vital to the success of the company. It was also responsible for some of its biggest failures or mistakes, but extraordinary founders are the ones who are willing to make mistakes as part of the journey, learn from them, and move on. 

Working for an extraordinary founder is not for the faint of heart. It is grueling and extraordinarily rewarding. The work is a constant negotiation to figure out what the right thing is (thing could be a process, product, decision, strategic direction, etc.) I’ll get to this below, but the best operators for founder-led companies are ones who are ready to be in that negotiation all day every day — who see the negotiation as part of building an extraordinary company.

2) Extraordinary companies are built in the image of extraordinary founders — essentially when the personality of the company is an expression of the strengths (and weaknesses) of the founder. 

Stripe is not successful because it behaves like Google. Stripe is successful because it behaves, significantly, like Patrick. Airbnb is not successful because it behaves like Facebook. It is successful because it regularly behaves like Brian. 

Anyone who worked at both Google and Facebook can tell you that the two companies feel wildly different and behave completely differently. A very different kind of person was successful at Facebook than at Google in the early days. 

When I worked there, Google felt like the company version of a University — someplace where brilliant people could go, research ideas, incubate crazy ones, and experiment with shipping things. They built beautiful infrastructure and elegant products and were fearless about thinking 25 years in the future (see: self-driving cars, a project that started 15 years ago). It is no wonder that it was founded by two Stanford PhDs. 

Facebook, in contrast, felt like a dorm room in college. It also behaved like a punkish college hacker. It was extraordinary at throwing shit at the walls, seeing what stuck, learning from that, and moving on faster than any company could. It was a learning machine. Anyone who knew Mark in his early days would say that it felt like him. 

The most extraordinary companies are ritualistically built in the image of their founder. You cannot copy and paste the practices of another company and expect them to (a) work and (b) help you scale in a healthy way. 

3) The job of an exceptional operator is to teach the company to act like the founder at scale.

As an operator, your job fundamentally is to deeply learn the personality of that founder, understand how they think, and turn that into teams of people who can broadly make decisions in the way the founder would even if he/she is not in the room. The job is NOT to come in to a company with pre-packaged frameworks like EOS or phrases “this is the way Google/Facebook/Stripe did it” as the answer to how to run the company. 

The reason why many, many, many execs succeed at one company and fail when they go to the next one is because they come in and try to implement what worked previously instead of deeply getting to know the new founder and the new company. 

One of our exceptional Glue People, Robin Bot Miller, gave me this sentence, and it was a huge lightbulb moment for me because it perfectly explains what I believe about being an exceptional operator. I’m going to say it again: As an operator, your job is to teach the company to act like the founder at scale. 

Anyone who has been through Glue Club can attest, we have surprisingly few frameworks. That is because my belief is that the best operators are great at a few things (and none of them are copying and pasting frameworks from one company to the next): 

• The ability to ask great questions

• A First Principles approach to all problems 

• Translation: the ability to turn the personality of the founder and the fundamentals of the business into something that anyone can understand

• An experimentation mindset: try things, fail, learn from it, move on to the next experiment

• A product mindset: the ability to think about things in terms of the customer and the problem first, and to seek solutions that actually scale. 

• The ability to speak truth to power and a willingness to fight battles/negotiate for the important things

• Organizing and motivating people to get things done

To be clear, our job as operators is not to be “yes people” but rather to fundamentally understand the DNA of the founder and the company, and partner with the founder to build the strongest company possible. Much of the time, building the best thing possible involves a deep negotiation of what is “right.” You win some of those negotiations and you lose many of them. That negotiation is part of the process of the founder growing and learning what they believe is right for the company. Great founders surround themselves with people they enjoy debating with; that negotiation is part of the process of shaping an extraordinary company. 

4) The most extraordinary founders are voracious learners. Having worked for Mark Zuckerberg twice, one of the most mindblowing things to witness was his learning curve and how much he grew as a leader in 10 years. Mark did not start out as someone who was obviously going to be a successful CEO of a $100B revenue company — he became that leader. Yes, he has something in his DNA BUT he also learned and grew and surrounded himself with people he could learn from and grow with. 

I’ll say it again: Extraordinary founders are not common. They are not once-in-a-generation, but they are also not everywhere. Mediocre founders are everywhere. And terrible founders are much more common than extraordinary ones. I wish more founders understood the work and approach it takes to become an extraordinary founder. 

Every single extraordinary founder that I have spent time with has a few things in common: 

• They are broadly self-aware and dedicated to self-improvement 

• They learn faster than anyone you’ve ever met

• They are willing to listen and incorporate your ideas/feedback if you can work at the same speed as them 

• They love to debate and can absolutely change their mind but you have to be able to start from first principles

I say this because I don’t believe that the equation for a successful, generational company is any founder in Founder Mode. The equation for a successful, generational company is an extraordinary leader in Founder Mode and I believe extraordinary leaders are made, not born. I think Fidji Simo and Satya Nadella are fascinating examples of extraordinary CEOs operating in Founder Mode who are not actually founders. We can all learn something from this. 

I’ve seen plenty of companies with exceptional potential get screwed up by founders who were unable to grow. As I said, it is as possible for a founder to destroy a good company as it is for them to create an extraordinary one. If Founder Mode becomes a definition for the behavior of the extraordinary founders, then learning and growing — and surrounding yourself with people you want to learn from — is a huge part of the equation.

5) One of the hardest jobs as a founder is to find people who are going to be exceptional at working for YOU. Most new founders can’t identify the right kind of hire let alone onboard them in a way that sets clear expectations or delegate in a way that makes their strong preferences or desires clear. This is why “hire great people and give them room” is such overly simplistic, toxic advice. Most founders are TERRIBLE at exec hiring when they start out. 

Years and years ago, Mark Zuckerberg and I had a conversation and he said, “Everyone says I’m a terrible manager.” And I remember looking at him and saying, “I think you just have to find people who thrive while working for you.” 

There are so many kinds of managers in the world and we can all always strive to be better at management, but every single manager in the world has a “type.” We are all better at managing certain kinds of people than others. Working for Mark, at least in the early days, meant you should never expect a performance review but you could always expect robust, sometimes bash-your-head-against-a-wall, debate about ideas and a lot of direct, sometimes searing feedback. It was not for everyone, but he eventually surrounded himself with people who could thrive in that environment.

As a founder, the most important job you have is to get to know YOURSELF, to figure out what kinds of people are going to be successful working for you, and then be crystal clear about that. Just because someone was wildly successful at your biggest competitor, or at a company you look up to, does not mean they will be successful working for YOU. The journey of building a team that can help you scale your company is the journey of finding people who are going to be exceptional at translating your vision into the products, processes, and everyday decisions of your company. It is the journey of finding people that you WANT to learn from and you look forward to fighting/negotiating with – the journey of surrounding yourself with people who will make you better. 

As an operator, we own the other side of that coin – finding founders that we believe in. It’s important to understand that the best version of the company you are building will be an expression of the personality of that founder. Part of your job is to help create and scale that. Yes, you can help try to shape or steer it as well by partnering with, negotiating with, and coaching the founder. But you cannot run a company in spite of a founder, and if you lose your belief in the founder, you should leave the company. 

6) An essential part of Founder Mode has to be learning how to delegate well. That is wildly different than “hiring great people and giving them room.” That phrase is overly simplistic in a destructive way (again, turns out Paul, Brian and I violently agree). Much of the reason why "hire good people and give them room" hasn't worked for a lot of founders is because (a) they aren't good at hiring and (b) they aren't good at delegating. To me, the nuance in scale comes from how you delegate. 

Great delegation is teaching people what’s important and what you care about — what you need to be involved in. Let's say you're a company that buys hotels as a business. A bad version of delegation for a new exec is "we trust your judgment to buy the right hotels." A lot of the power of great delegation and management is in how you delegate: "Please go surface hotels you think we should buy based on the following criteria that matters to me and then let's talk through your proposal and decide how to move forward." 

Does every single detail of building a company matter? No, there are lots of places where you should be able to delegate the whole decision to someone. But there are lots of details and decisions where you need to delegate with clear parameters and ask them to come back to you for input or for a decision. 

Great delegation makes the parameters of success clear and creates leverage — someone to go do a lot of the work — while still keeping control over the most important decisions. The process of great delegation is the same as the process of teaching people how to make decisions that follow the DNA of the founder. 

To summarize, here are the 6 things I believe about Founder Mode: 

1) The most extraordinary companies in the world are run by intense, brilliant founders. 

2) Extraordinary companies are built in the image of extraordinary founders.

3) The job of an exceptional operator is to teach the company to act like the founder at scale.

4) The most extraordinary founders are voracious learners.

5) One of the hardest jobs as a founder is to find people who are going to be exceptional at working for YOU.

6) An essential part of Founder Mode has to be learning how to delegate well. 

Most importantly, I hope the conversation about Founder Mode can get more nuanced. There is so much to be learned from companies that have broken through the wall of millions in revenue to billions. What does it take to start at zero and then grow as a leader to run a strong, healthy company for 20 years? 

As Paul says, I think as more people study it, they will find that extraordinary founders have essential qualities in common and that there are fundamental similarities in how they build and run their companies. None of it will trace back to “hire great people and give them room”; ALL of them will trace back to founders who were able to build enough self-awareness and learn fast enough to build teams that were great at translating for them – teams that could scale their instincts and values. All of it will trace back to founders who surrounded themselves with extraordinary people they could learn from.

Founder Mode will end up being about people who learned how to scale themselves through self-awareness and learning, great hiring and delegation.