Founder Mode: A Liar’s Perspective
👋Hi! I'm Molly. This is where I share the lessons I’ve learned from building fast-moving, messy, ambitious companies. For more from me, you can also find me on the WorkLife Podcast, on LinkedIn, and in Glue Club, a community for leaders who care about building great companies.
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.
