Rethinking Leadership: The Promise and Pitfalls of "Founder Mode"

Photo by Rohan Gupta on Unsplash

Paul Graham’s recent piece on “founder mode” has people nodding along like he discovered something new. He didn’t. What he described—founders who stay deeply engaged with their companies rather than delegating everything to direct reports—has always existed. The reason it’s getting attention now is because the alternative, what Graham calls “manager mode,” has produced so many mediocre outcomes that people are looking for permission to do something different.

I’ve run the full spectrum. Founder of my own company for four years. Engineering manager at Etsy learning participative leadership. VP at Shutterstock managing 105+ people across continents. CTO at multiple companies, one catastrophically toxic. I’ve seen founder mode work brilliantly. I’ve seen it become a weapon for incompetent narcissists to justify their inability to delegate.

The nuance is non-trivial and significant. Graham’s essay treats “founder mode” as a monolithic concept. It’s not. It’s a set of tools that work in some contexts and fail catastrophically in others. The question isn’t whether to operate in founder mode. It’s when founder mode serves the organization versus when it serves the founder’s ego.

What Founder Mode Actually Is

Graham describes Steve Jobs holding annual retreats with Apple’s 100 most important people, regardless of org chart position. Skip-level meetings becoming normal rather than exceptional. Founders maintaining direct engagement across the organization instead of operating only through VPs.

This works when the founder has genuine insight into the business and the judgment to know where their engagement adds value. Jobs knew product and design at a level his VPs didn’t. His skip-levels weren’t theater, they were how he maintained direct connection to the work that mattered most. That’s founder mode as a devastatingly effective feature.

But I’ve also seen founder mode as a bug. A CEO who insisted on being in every product decision, every engineering standup, every customer call, not because he had unique insight or deep curiosity but because he fundamentally didn’t trust anyone else’s judgment. Including people who were objectively more competent than he was in their domains. This was control expressed as bumbling interference.

The difference isn’t subtle. One creates alignment and speeds up decision-making. The other creates bottlenecks and organizational paralysis. One empowers people by giving them direct access to leadership context. The other disempowers them by making everything contingent on a single person’s approval.

When I Was In Founder Mode

Running mohchi from 2011 to 2015, I was necessarily in founder mode. Six people, limited runway, moving fast. Of course I was in every decision. There was no organizational structure to delegate through. The question wasn’t whether to stay engaged, it was whether I was engaged in the right things.

Some of that engagement was productive. I understood the business model inside and out. I knew our technical constraints. I could make product decisions quickly because I had full context. That’s founder mode working as designed.

Some of it was destructive. I made unilateral decisions about team processes without involving my co-founder. I changed direction frequently because I was learning in real-time and didn’t have the discipline to communicate why. Looking back, I was operating in “founder mode” the way a lot of founders do—conflating speed and brute force with effectiveness, conviction with correctness. The startup didn’t fail because of this, but it certainly didn’t help.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was bringing the command-and-control patterns from banking into a startup context and calling it “founder mode.” The real problem wasn’t the mode, it was that I hadn’t learned participative leadership yet. That came at Etsy, where I discovered that involving people in decisions didn’t slow things down, it, perhaps unintuitively at the time, made them better. But that learning happened because I was forced to operate differently. If I’d stayed in founder mode at mohchi, I would have likely kept making the same mistakes (though my co-founder would, and did, put a stop to my worst offenses—thanks, Andy 🙏🏻).

When Founder Mode Becomes Pathological

Graham acknowledges the risk: “Founders who are unable to delegate even things they should will use founder mode as the excuse.” This is understated. I’ve seen founder mode become a cover for pathological behavior.

The CEO who can’t distinguish between domains where his intuition is valuable and domains where he’s just wrong, but insists on being involved in everything because he’s the founder. The one who treats every VP as a threat to his authority rather than a competent leader he hired to own a function. The one who holds skip-level meetings not to gather information but to undermine his directs by going around them.

It’s incompetence with a fashionable narrative, regardless of attempts to spin it as something else. But the language of “founder mode” gives it legitimacy. “I’m staying engaged across the organization” sounds better than “I don’t trust anyone and I’m a bottleneck.” The pathology gets rationalized as hands-on leadership.

I watched this destroy a company recently. Founder CEO, convinced of his own brilliance, in every decision at every level, in every discipline. Product, engineering, data, sales, marketing, operations, customer success, brand, finance, hr, legal—he knew better than everyone; a “true” (self-witnessed) polymath. The domains he admittedly excelled in were self-branding (“I want one of the company’s top goals this year to be about *my* personal brand.”) and giveaways of luxury items for low-yield customer acquisition. He was profoundly incompetent in most domains but was utterly incapable of seeing it. His “founder mode” meant constant direction changes, arbitrary decisions, and systematic undermining of anyone competent enough to threaten his self-image. That’s nothing but dysfunction.

The organization couldn’t function because everything required his approval, but his approval was contingent on whim rather than strategy. People couldn’t make decisions autonomously because the founder might reverse them without explanation. The “skip-level” meetings he insisted on weren’t about gathering information, they were about demonstrating his authority and identifying people to blame when things went wrong. Documenting mercurial decisions in order to structurally impose accountability when inevitable contradictions were made without notice also held no purchase.

That’s the dark, bizarro, version of founder mode. And the problem is, from the inside, the incompetent founder thinks he’s doing exactly what Steve Jobs did. He’s engaged. He’s involved. He’s maintaining the culture. What he can’t see, what the Dunning-Kruger effect prevents him from seeing, is that Jobs had judgment and he doesn’t.

What Actually Matters

The useful distinction isn’t between “founder mode” and “manager mode.” It’s between competent leadership and incompetent leadership. Between leaders who know when their engagement adds value and leaders who can’t tell the difference.

Competent leaders in founder mode are selective. They stay deeply engaged in the domains where they have unique insight or where alignment is critical. They delegate everything else—actually delegate it, not just nominally. They use skip-levels to gather information and build trust, not to undermine their VPs. They maintain high standards but trust their leaders to meet them.

Incompetent leaders in founder mode are indiscriminate. They’re in everything because they can’t distinguish between what matters and what doesn’t. They skip-level not to gather information but to maintain control. They confuse presence with value. They think delegation is weakness rather than recognizing it as the only way to scale.

The same behaviors—skip-levels, direct engagement, staying close to the work—produce completely different outcomes depending on the leader’s competence and intent. Which means “founder mode” isn’t a methodology you can adopt. It’s a description of how some effective founders operate, and an excuse for how some ineffective founders justify their inability to scale.

What I Learned At Scale

At Shutterstock, managing 105+ people across multiple continents, I couldn’t be in founder mode even if I’d wanted to. The organization was too large, too distributed, too complex. My job was to create systems that worked without my constant involvement. Clear frameworks, consistent processes, strong leaders who could operate autonomously, yet always be assured of my air cover.

But I still did skip-levels. Regular 1-1s with people three levels down. Not to micromanage, but to gather signal about whether the systems were working, whether my directs were effective, whether people felt heard. This wasn’t founder mode. It was maintaining connection to the organization without creating myself as a bottleneck.

The difference is intent and constraint. I wasn’t trying to be involved in every decision. I didn’t need to; I trusted my leaders. I was trying to understand whether the organization’s architecture was sound. When I found problems, I worked through my directs to fix them, not around them. That’s the fundamental distinction. Founder mode as Graham describes it risks becoming a bypass mechanism—going around your VPs when you should be either coaching them or replacing them.

At Candid, as CTO, I was back in something closer to founder mode—smaller team, earlier stage, more direct engagement with the work. But by then I’d learned the difference between productive engagement and controlling behavior. I stayed close to product engineering and manufacturing systems because those were domains where my judgment mattered. I delegated platform engineering and security completely because my Director was better at them than I was.

The question isn’t whether to operate in founder mode. It’s whether you have the judgment to know where your engagement creates value versus where it creates friction. And whether you have the humility to recognize when someone else’s judgment is better than yours.

What This Means

Graham’s essay is less a discovery than a permission slip. Founders who’ve been told they need to “scale themselves” by delegating everything now have language to justify staying engaged. That’s fine if they’re competent. It’s dangerous if they’re not.

The real insight isn’t that founder mode exists. It’s that there’s no universal management methodology that works at every stage, in every context, for every leader, for every personality. The pathology is thinking there is, whether that’s “delegate everything” or “stay engaged in everything.”

What matters is accurate diagnosis of where you add value and where you don’t. Where your intuition is reliable and where it’s not. Where your engagement accelerates the team and where it constrains them. Most leaders are bad at this self-assessment. The best ones are constantly questioning it.

Founder mode isn’t a solution. It’s a description of how some effective leaders operate in some contexts. The danger is treating it as a prescription; another management framework to adopt wholesale rather than a set of tools to deploy selectively based on judgment and context.

I’ve been on both sides. Founder who stayed too engaged in things I shouldn’t have. Leader at scale who had to build systems that worked without me. The lesson from both: the mode doesn’t matter. The judgment does.