By now you’ve likely read or heard about Paul Graham’s ‘founder mode’ essay. I started reading the essay with excitement—you could feel energy and conviction from the get-go—and I left the essay… confused. And frankly, worried that this essay will unintentionally become a manifesto for a whole new generation of awful founders (hence, why I bothered to write this during Labor Day weekend).

Now, first things first: I’m not a founder, and I don’t pretend to know the founder’s experience. But I do know teams and organizations, and I’ve worked with many founders. So with a lot of humility, and openness to feedback that I’m missing something here, below are some thoughts on the essay.  

I think I understand Graham’s core point: that creating and growing—not just an idea but a group of people—into a successful organization requires an approach quite unique from running an established company. Conventional wisdom is unlikely to help founders realize their vision, and many of the people giving advice don’t get how different these early days actually are. We need a better understanding of ‘founder mode,’ so that founders are better set up for success. This all makes sense to me!

But that’s where my nodding along ends, and the crinkly lines of confusion on my forehead begin. Though I’ve not fully refined my takeaways, in the interest of not totally missing the moment, below are three points that initially jumped out, plus suggested reframes for each.

Confusion 1: What the heck is ‘manager mode’? 

In the essay, ‘manager mode’ apparently refers to hiring “professional managers” to run a company. But what is a professional manager: someone with an MBA, someone with experience in management roles, something else? This is just a guess, but perhaps Graham is getting at the folly of hiring a bunch of bureaucrats. And I think we all agree that bureaucrats and dynamic environments (like startups—or most companies, frankly) don’t mesh. I suppose we could stop there, but it’s worth digging deeper. 

Moving the professional managers category from the abstract into reality, I don’t think the notion of ‘manager mode’ holds up. Given my work experience (over a dozen orgs of different shapes and sizes), I can confidently say that most people in management positions aren’t “taught to run companies” as Graham suggests, let alone taught well. I’ve seen managers who unfortunately practice something akin to “the principle that the CEO should engage with the company only via his or her direct reports.” Those managers learned that principle from somewhere—but where? Probably not an MBA program, and probably not from another good manager. 

Most managers are placed into their roles with little-to-no training in management or leadership—and yes, I’m lumping management/leadership together because they are intertwined, even if not explicitly, in the essay and in real life—and then left to fend for themselves. More often than not, their managers have had a similar experience. Hard skills, like finance, might be an exception. But even there, formal training must be followed with on-the-job learning. 

It turns out that learning management skills remains somewhat of an apprenticeship (oy vey), so—unless you’re lucky enough to work with a leader who received quality on-the-job training and/or exposure to effective management in practice—we’re all stuck with perpetual cycles of under-developed managers and no meaningful standards of performance. That’s why I think managers are less the “professional fakers” Graham alludes to and more like poorly prepared individuals trying to get by in this world. (Anecdotally, I’ve never worked with a manager who doesn’t also contribute IC work. I’m not saying Graham’s parasitic manager caricature doesn’t exist, but it’s more likely that underperformance—managerial and otherwise—can be linked to other causes, two of which I get into below.)

To be clear, this implies that in addition to non-founders offering unhelpful advice and underwhelming performance by so-called professional managers, former founders themselves are likely spouting suboptimal advice on effective management. 

Potential reframe: Think of management skills and org design as potential tools. 

I’m not suggesting that founders shouldn’t be skeptical of managers and “black box” org structures. Very much the opposite. Founders should think critically about the skills and roles they need to accomplish their goals, hire people to meet those needs, and use org design to enhance workflows, communication, and that sort of thing. 

But distilling the roles you actually need in the context of org structure isn’t always straightforward, and advice to overhire runs rampant (in early stage and mature companies alike, by the way). For example, as a company grows, the volume of “stuff” to manage (coordination, communication, finances, etc.) also grows. Should a founder hire people to manage the “stuff,” distribute responsibility among existing employees to manage it, or allocate resources toward designing processes and tools that help streamline it? 

There is no right answer, of course. The key is for founders to understand (and receive help in understanding) what they need, while acknowledging the reality of management skills today, and make hiring and org design decisions accordingly. I think where this leaves us is that ‘manager mode’ probably isn’t a thing—but hiring ineffective managers is. 

Confusion 2: Delegation and micromanagement are not binary opposites. 

The essay seriously mischaracterizes delegation: “You tell your direct reports what to do, and it's up to them to figure out how.” Agreed—that is terrible advice! But delegation isn’t tossing responsibility over to someone and hoping it all works out. It involves much more: understanding the capability of the delegatee and scoping the delegated responsibilities accordingly; conveying relevant context to them; aligning on outcomes; providing clarity on practicalities like timing and resources; potentially providing training, tools, and ongoing support; etc. Feedback loops are important so that the work doesn’t end up in a black hole, along with wasted efforts. Another way to put it: Effective delegation is a lot of work.

In addition, the essay implies that the only way to be involved in the details of what your team is doing is to micromanage: “But you don't get involved in the details of what they do. That would be micromanaging them, which is bad.” This statement also suggests that conventional wisdom considers micromanagement to always be wrong. 

Neither of these claims is true. Hands-on management through working sessions and coaching is just one way to stay involved in initiatives without micromanagement; there are many other approaches. And sometimes, you absolutely do need someone to execute what you need and how you need it because you simply don’t have time to do it yourself or take the time to delegate properly. This is normal and most would agree it’s 100% appropriate.

Potential reframe: Delegation and execution each have costs, and founders must weigh the ROI of delegating vs executing tasks themselves.

In reality, the space between micromanagement and hands-off delegation is vast. Instead of thinking in (what I would consider false) binaries, founders may get more value out of identifying the things they must or want to be actively involved in vs those they are comfortable merely keeping a pulse on. 

For the former category, founders could take various approaches ranging from leading an initiative outright to participating in working sessions, to reviewing work product, and so on. For the latter category, founders could consider potential candidates to take on those responsibilities and, exercising solid delegation skills, stay more or less involved depending on performance, experience, and trust levels. Over time, appropriate levels of involvement would likely shift, perhaps decreasing as trust grows, or perhaps increasing during critical moments for the organization.

By the way, for what it’s worth: all of these skills are core management and leadership skills!

Confusion 3: Founders are not victims. 

The most confusing element of this essay was how it portrayed founders as victims of sorts. Without discounting Graham’s point that founders get bad advice from people who don’t know what they’re talking about, he paints a picture in which founders have little agency, and everyone is out to get them. Just glance at the language in the essay: 

professional fakers

let them drive the company into the ground

founders … being gaslit from both sides

everyone telling these founders the wrong thing

C-level execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the world

headwind of bad advice

It starts to sound like there is a conspiracy founders are falling victim to! I don’t know about you, but all founders I’ve met are courageous—enough to start a company. Not victims at all. The good ones are also humble enough to know when to ask for help, while being capable and smart enough to meet advice with healthy skepticism. 

And the best ones? They own their decisions and assume accountability for the successes and failures of their company. They’ve embraced that being a founder implies overcoming slim odds, while navigating myriad priorities and assembling and leading a team of people (just about the toughest thing to do successfully in life). And while they remain adaptable when the ground shifts beneath them, the best founders I’ve met do their darndest to ensure that the world’s circumstances —including bad advice, poor market conditions, weak hires, resource mismanagement, and so on—don’t cripple them, but rather shape their journeys as leaders of a new venture. 

I 100% applaud and support Graham’s call to more effectively support founders. But I don’t understand the jump from there to blaming others for failures and setbacks.

Potential reframe: Cultivating leadership skills should be a priority for founders, as well as for their advisors and investors. 

Although you typically won’t find me referencing Jocko Willink, it seems appropriate to highlight one of his more well-known quotes: “There are no bad teams, just bad leaders.” Leadership is the big, gaping hole in Graham’s essay. He never talks about it; the word leadership doesn’t even appear in the essay. This might be by design; it is, after all, an overused and relatively abstract term. 

And yet a call for teaching and developing strong leadership skills amongst founders, given that this is practically nonexistent across the entire private sector (see also Confusion 1), is the most important message Graham could have, but did not, deliver. Which—and please excuse my sarcasm—is not surprising given the leadership behaviors I’ve seen in the tech sector. 

The thing is, founders aren’t merely developing an idea or inventing a thing and then letting someone else run with it. Founders have made the bold decision to take that idea, nurture it, and invite others to trust them and join the journey. This is first and foremost a massive leadership challenge! So why don’t we set up founders for success by equipping them with leadership skills and supporting their growth as leaders? 

If a founder is letting people “drive the company into the ground” or unable to negotiate less-than-optimal circumstances—harsh as it may sound, that’s a leadership failure. All the best founders I’ve met know this.

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