September 20th, 2024 - Everyone is talking about the "Founder Mode" post from Y Combinator’s Paul Graham after Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky’s talk. I found this very refreshing and wish I had summarized it before they did. My experience aligns with the sentiment that VCs consisting of non-operators regularly drive their companies into the ditch with bad advice on how to manage. I have been on the boards of 20+ companies and usually the operator voice is overwhelmed by the “investor/metric driven” manager. I am glad I now have vocabulary to fight back thanks to Paul and Brian.
First, let’s define “founder mode” – to me, it is less about being a founder and more about having the energy and willingness to stay in the details and resist the “easy button” of blind delegation. So, this applies just as much to technology leaders (and other disciplines too) as it does to founders themselves.
The nuance I wanted to cover today is how to preserve or create founder mode for technology and product leaders inside of large enterprises. This opinion is based on my years of being a tech leader (both at early-stage companies and bigger ones) and talking to many others in our Cresting Wave universe.
It is easy to talk yourself into the fact that there is no way to be in the weeds across large organizations.
It seems like less work – First, I do think the reason people believe manager mode is better is that it generally is less work in the moment – “hire someone great and then I don’t have to worry about X, Y or Z”. That type of wishful thinking makes manager mode easy to buy into but ultimately sows the seeds of your demise.
Agreeing with everyone/doing what is “standard” is easier than being different – Pushing back on the conventional wisdom is hard. At big companies, founder mode is perceived as chaotic and that you are power hungry by the “managers” outside of your part of the organization – “Why do they have to be involved in everything?”, “They want to make all the decisions,” “We need more status tracking.” By the way, as long as it is done with the right style, your team will come to appreciate you being involved because it shows that what they are doing is important and valued.
So, what is the answer for an entrepreneurial-minded technology leader feeling stifled in a big company and how do you scale to preserve founder mode across a broad organization?
The answer is a smart, efficient process that focuses on simplifying solutions and producing artifacts that enable you and others to stay informed and involved without having to be in every meeting.
For every project, good, easy to read documents should be required. These don’t need to be perfect, hard to create or slow to create. Teaching your teams to write clearly and concisely, describing the problems, solutions, and value created, is one of the best investments you can make. These documents should be mandatory for all product features, technical designs, infrastructure decisions, team changes, and more. Forcing things to be on “paper” enables everyone to access the information in their own time and enables you to remain in founder mode in a time-efficient way.
Our Cresting Wave process for technology organizations is similar, it is focused on providing another cheat code to founder mode – deputizing our team to scout for new solutions on your behalf so you can be aware of innovations in the market and how they can benefit you specifically. Reach out to get engaged with us.
Done right you can closely manage large organizations, feel connected to all the key decisions and hopefully not have to sacrifice your whole life to do it (unless you want to, of course).
Contact
Bill Murphy, Managing Partner at Cresting Wave
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