In late 2024, Paul Graham dropped a single essay that basically broke the brains of every venture capitalist and middle manager from Palo Alto to Bangalore. It was called "Founder Mode."
The premise? Everything we’ve been taught about scaling a company is a lie. Or, at the very least, a massive misunderstanding of how the world's most successful businesses actually function.
Graham didn’t just wake up one day and decide to invent a new buzzword. The whole thing was sparked by a talk given by Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky. Chesky had spent years following the "standard" advice: hire good people, give them space, and get out of the way. He was told to be a professional manager. He was told to treat his company like a series of "black boxes" where you only look at the output, not the process.
The result? It almost killed Airbnb.
The Great Management Gaslight
When Graham writes about founder mode paul graham, he’s describing a specific kind of leadership that defies the traditional "Manager Mode" taught in business schools. In manager mode, you delegate. You hire a VP of Engineering, tell them the goal, and then—critically—you don't "micromanage" them.
But as Chesky discovered, and as Graham articulated, this often just gives "professional fakers" the room to drive a company into the ground.
You’ve probably seen this if you’ve worked in a corporate environment. The CEO is isolated on the top floor, only talking to their direct reports. Those reports are busy curating what the CEO sees. Suddenly, the person with the most vision and skin in the game is the person with the least information. Graham argues that founders feel like they're being gaslit from both sides: by the experts telling them to step back, and by the managers who aren't actually doing the job.
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Why Founder Mode Is Different
So, what is it actually? Honestly, Graham admits we don't have a full manual for it yet. But we can see the shapes of it in how people like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk run things.
It isn't just "micromanagement" with a cooler name. It’s about proximity to the truth.
- Skip-level meetings: Instead of only talking to the VPs, the founder goes deep into the org chart. They talk to the individual designers or the engineers actually shipping code.
- Abolishing "Black Boxes": In manager mode, you don't care how the sausage is made as long as the numbers look good. In founder mode, you care deeply because you're the one who knows if the sausage is going to taste like cardboard in six months.
- Moral Authority: A founder can do things a hired CEO simply can't. They can pivot the entire company on a Tuesday because they "feel" the market shifting. A professional manager has to build a consensus that usually takes six months to form, by which time the opportunity is dead.
The Jensen Huang and Steve Jobs Reality
Look at Nvidia. Jensen Huang reportedly has 50 direct reports. To a traditional business professor, that's a nightmare. It’s "unscalable." But Jensen wants to be close to the details. He wants to know exactly what’s happening at the edge of the company.
Then there’s the classic Steve Jobs example. Jobs didn't just sit in boardrooms. He was in the design studio. He was obsessing over the font on a screen or the curve of a glass panel. This is often dismissed as "eccentricity," but Graham argues it was actually Jobs operating in a highly efficient founder mode that allowed Apple to outpace competitors who were stuck in bureaucratic manager mode.
The Backlash: Is It Just Toxic Micromanagement?
Naturally, not everyone is buying it. Critics argue that founder mode paul graham is just a hall pass for toxic behavior.
If you give a founder with a big ego and no self-awareness the "permission" to skip levels and intervene in every tiny detail, you don't get a trillion-dollar company. You get a lawsuit and a mass exodus of talent. Experts like Judd Antin have pointed out that many founders aren't actually good at management, so they label their failures as "founder mode" rather than learning how to actually lead people.
There’s also the risk of the "single point of failure." If everything has to go through the founder, the company stops moving the moment that founder takes a vacation or gets sick. Scale requires systems. You can't be in every room when you have 50,000 employees.
How to Actually Use This (Without Being a Jerk)
If you're running a team or a company, you don't have to choose one or the other as a permanent state. Most successful leaders actually toggle between the two.
1. Identify your "High-Trust" zones. There are parts of your company where you can probably afford to be in manager mode. If your accounting department is humming along and the audits are clean, let them work. But if your core product—the thing that defines your brand—is losing its edge, that’s when you switch to founder mode. Dive deep. Get into the weeds.
2. Normalize "Intervention," not "Interruption." There’s a difference between asking an engineer "Why did we make this technical trade-off?" and telling them "Change this button to blue because I said so." Founder mode works when the founder uses their unique context to help the team, not just to satisfy a whim.
3. Use the "Skip-Level" for Intel, not for Orders. Talk to the people three levels down to understand the reality on the ground. Use that info to hold your direct reports accountable. If the VP tells you the project is "on track" but the lead dev tells you they’re three months behind, you’ve found a black box that needs opening.
Actionable Insights for Your Leadership
- Audit your calendar: Are you spending 100% of your time with your direct reports? If so, you’re likely being gaslit. Schedule one skip-level coffee a week.
- Identify the "Professional Fakers": Look for managers who focus more on the process of management (meetings about meetings, perfect slide decks) than the output of the work.
- Define your "Must-Win" details: You can't obsess over everything. Pick the three things that make your company special and refuse to delegate the final say on those details.
Founder mode isn't a license to be a tyrant. It’s a realization that the person who built the vision is often the only one who can protect it as it grows. You don't have to apologize for caring about the details. In fact, according to Paul Graham, it might be the only way to actually win.