In my Openness book, I discuss “project entrepreneurs” who overlap considerably with what is called “founder mode” in the commentary quoted below.
(p. B4) People like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs at times seemed to have a je ne sais quoi that allowed them to act and behave as leaders of their companies in ways that would have tripped up mere mortals.
This past week, Silicon Valley put a name to it: “Founder Mode.”
It’s a term coined by Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, an influential startup incubator in the San Francisco Bay Area. He wrote an essay this month gaining a lot of attention in tech circles that pits his “Founder Mode” against what he calls “Manager Mode.”
Graham tries to put his finger on the special relationship entrepreneurs have with their companies that he argues outsiders just lack.
. . .
In a podcast late last year, Chesky, who co-founded Airbnb originally as AirBed and Breakfast, talked about the three traits he said better equip a company’s founder over an outside manager.
“They’re the biological parent—you can love something but when you’re the biological parent of something, like, it came from you, it is you, there’s a deep passion and love,” Chesky said. “The second thing a founder has is they have the permission…like I can’t tell another child what to do but if they were my child I probably could.”
This empowers a founder to make dramatic changes, such as rebranding.
And finally, according to Chesky, a founder knows how the company was built in the first place. “You know how to rebuild it, you know the freezing temperature of a company, you know at what temperature it melts,” he said.
. . .
Before publishing his essay, Graham ran it by a few tech titans, including Musk. After it was published, Musk weighed in on X with his own endorsement: “Worth reading.”
For the full commentary see:
(Note: ellipses between paragraphs added; ellipsis within paragraph in original.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date September 7, 2024, and has the title “With ‘Founder Mode,’ Silicon Valley Makes Micromanaging Cool.” The French phrase is italicized in the print version.)
My book, mentioned above, is:
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.