Silicon Valley is currently obsessed with two words. Founder mode. It sounds like a video game power-up, but for anyone trying to build a company that actually lasts, it's becoming the only way to survive.
The whole thing started with an essay by Paul Graham, the Y Combinator co-founder who has a knack for spotting patterns before they become obvious. He watched Brian Chesky give a talk at a private YC event that basically blew everyone’s hair back. Chesky, the guy who built Airbnb, admitted he almost killed his company by listening to "experts."
These experts—the seasoned VPs, the McKinsey-types, the professional managers—all told him the same thing: "Hire good people and stay out of their way."
He did. It was a disaster.
The big lie of professional management
Basically, the world is obsessed with "manager mode." If you went to business school, this is what you learned. You treat the company like a series of black boxes. You hire an executive, give them a goal, and tell them to figure out how to get there. Getting into the weeds is called "micromanagement." And in the corporate world, being a micromanager is basically the worst thing you can be called.
But Paul Graham argues that for a founder, this advice is often a death sentence.
When you treat your departments as black boxes, you stop knowing what’s actually happening. You lose the "feel" for the product. Worse, you become vulnerable to what Graham calls "professional fakers." These are people who are incredibly good at looking like they are doing a great job while actually driving the company into a ditch.
How Paul Graham Founder Mode actually works
It's not just about being a jerk or refusing to delegate. It's about changing how you delegate.
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In "manager mode," you only talk to your direct reports. The CEO talks to the VP, the VP talks to the Director, and so on. It’s a clean, pretty org chart.
In Paul Graham founder mode, that chart is a suggestion, not a law.
Skip-level meetings are the secret sauce
Chesky started doing something that would make a traditional HR director faint: he held skip-level meetings. He’d go three, four, or five levels down to talk to the people actually writing the code or designing the pixels.
Why? Because the truth gets diluted as it moves up the chain.
By the time a problem reaches the CEO through "proper channels," it has been polished, sugar-coated, and stripped of its urgency. Founder mode means you go straight to the source. You don't wait for the VP to tell you why the launch is late. You go talk to the engineer who’s actually struggling with the database.
The "Chief Product Officer" CEO
Graham points out that nearly every successful founder-led company functions this way. Steve Jobs was the ultimate example. He didn't just "set a vision" and go play golf. He was arguing about the shade of grey on a button.
Jensen Huang at NVIDIA reportedly has 50+ direct reports.
Mark Zuckerberg still spends hours a week in the weeds of product design.
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They don't do this because they are control freaks (well, maybe they are), but because the product is the company. If the CEO isn't the person who knows the most about the product, who should be?
Why this is so controversial
Honestly, this essay set the internet on fire because it feels like a personal attack on the entire class of professional managers. If "founder mode" is better, what happens to all the VPs who were hired to "bring adult supervision" to startups?
The pushback is real.
Critics say this is just a fancy way to justify being a toxic boss. They argue that nobody can scale a company to 10,000 people by being in every meeting. And they aren't entirely wrong. There is a very real risk of burnout—both for the founder and the employees who feel like they are being watched 24/7.
But Graham’s point is that the alternative—the "hands-off" approach—is why so many promising startups turn into bloated, slow-moving bureaucracies the moment they find success.
The "Professional Faker" problem
One of the most stinging parts of the Paul Graham founder mode essay is how he describes hired executives. He calls some of them "skillful liars."
That sounds harsh. But if you’ve ever worked in a big company, you know exactly who he’s talking about. These are the people who spend more time on their slide decks than on the actual work. They know how to "manage up."
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A founder in founder mode is the only person with the moral authority and the deep context to see through that BS. A hired manager might be fooled because they are playing the same game. A founder can't be fooled because they built the thing from scratch. They know where the bodies are buried.
Moving beyond the binary
It's tempting to think you have to choose one or the other. You don't.
Even the most intense "founder mode" leaders eventually have to build systems. The difference is the intent of those systems.
- Manager Mode systems are designed to let the leader stop thinking about the work.
- Founder Mode systems are designed to give the leader better visibility into the work.
How to actually apply this (without losing your mind)
If you're running a team or a company, you don't need to suddenly start breathing down everyone's neck. That’s just being a bad boss.
Instead, look at where you've been "gaslit" by the process.
- Are there parts of your business that feel like a "black box" to you?
- Do you feel like you're not allowed to talk to certain people because of the org chart?
- Has your intuition been overruled by someone who says "that's not how it's done at [Big Tech Company]"?
If the answer is yes, you might need to flip the switch.
Actionable Next Steps
- Audit your calendar. If you are only meeting with people who report directly to you, cancel one of those meetings this week. Instead, spend that hour with the person three levels down who is doing the most interesting work.
- Read the original essay. Don't just take my word for it. Paul Graham’s writing is famously sparse and worth the 10-minute read to see the nuances I might have glossed over.
- Identify your "High-Context" areas. You can't be in every detail. Pick the three things that are most critical to your company's soul (maybe it’s the UI, the pricing, or the customer support tone) and declare those as "Founder Mode" zones where you will be deeply, annoyingly involved.
- Kill the "Proper Channels" culture. Explicitly tell your team that it is okay—encouraged, even—to talk across departments without asking for permission. Friction is the enemy of founder mode.
The reality is that Paul Graham founder mode isn't a new way of working; it's the original way of working that got your company off the ground in the first place. Scaling doesn't have to mean selling your soul to a corporate handbook. Sometimes, it just means refusing to stop caring about the details.