Why Everyone in Tech is Talking About Founder Mode

Graham said operating in “manager mode” versus “founder mode” is anathema to companies.

“What this often means is hiring professional counterfeiters and letting them run the company into the ground,” he wrote.

A prime example of a tech titan embracing the founder mode is Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang, who has 60 direct reports and still eats in the company cafeteria.

Graham credited Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky for sparking the idea and most of the arguments on the blog. At a recent Y Combinator event, Chesky talked about how conventional advice on building and scaling a startup is being broken. He said, as he has before, that outside investors and managers simply don’t have the knowledge that founders have. He said dividing companies into organizational layers — isolating founders from anyone but their direct reports — often kills the business.

While the decline of manager mode might shock management consultants, Graham’s post traces Silicon Valley’s modus operandi. Tech culture has always revered founders and lean teams. Venture capitalists try to outdo each other in funding rounds to appear the most “founder friendly”—investors who won’t interfere too much. Future founders dream of the day when they can break away from Big Tech and start their own Next Big Thing, unencumbered by red tape.

And it’s a long weekend, with little happening online. The internet craves buzzy nomenclature, dividing people into camps, and the chance to get likes with a viral follow-up post.

The founders of “Gaslit”.

Chesky’s speech struck another nerve with the founders in the room and then with Graham’s online readers. The Airbnb executive said the founders are constantly “sticky” — first by outside voices asking them to run the company as managers, and then by employees who don’t like the way the manager is running.

Chesky is the only Airbnb co-founder left at the company, and while much of his leadership has been praised — he empathetically led a major flurry of pandemic-era layoffs and tried to reorient the hospitality giant — the stock has fallen more than 15% since then . initial public offering in 2020.

There are also notable exceptions to the positive founder mode: Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes were both founders who operated with autonomy, then ignominy.

On the other hand, Satya Nadella and Tim Cook are both outside managers who have given up on turning their companies around—in both cases, building on the legacies of powerful founders.

Thinkfluencers time to shine

Graham’s essay brought Chesky’s speech out of the YC room and into the rest of the world, where it exploded online. Now, investors, potential thought influencers, comedians and founders are all pitching in.

Basketball star-turned-investor Baron Davis likened being a founder to being an athlete.

Another investor was quick to come up with one of the tastiest examples of founder mode: the Costco deal of the century, which has withstood inflation thanks to a co-founder’s clear instructions to its CEO: “If you raise (the price of) the effing hot dog . , I will kill you.”

A tech newsletter writer previewed what meeting a fellow techie would look like this week.

Some users have been sounding warning bells about what’s next for Tech Discourse now that founder mode is officially a success.

Custom domains have been purchased.

And of course, unofficial products have already dropped.