Cofounder Mode
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Paul Graham set Silicon Valley ablaze a year and a half ago (was it only a year and a half ago?) with his essay Founder Mode. As with all of Graham’s essays, they are better consumed outright than summarized, so that you can appreciate that particular Grahamian urbanity, but this essay rapidly became meme-ified, shorn from its original context — which perhaps makes it less of a crime than it might otherwise be to summarize it for you, dear reader:
Founder mode, in short, is the idea that the CEO of a startup ought to stay intimately involved in their company’s workings, even as they grow. This is in contrast to manager mode, whereby one delegates everything to their reports.
I have worked with a great number of startups at this point, including those mature and big enough to get rebranded “scale-ups” or whatever the phrase du jour is, and so I feel relatively confident in saying, by now uncontroversially, that I agree with Graham: All great startups, and perhaps all founder-led companies of any stage, are led in this manner.
But I’ve also noticed something else: Founder mode leaders do best when they instill in their team an esprit de corps I have started to think of as cofounder mode.
Let me explain what I mean by way of example.
Two or three months after I joined Palantir, Alex Karp decided we needed to rethink the company’s homepage. I found myself flying weekly to Munich and Copenhagen, fitting in meetings about web copy (and the future of the West) around his client meetings and workouts.
Alex cared about it all, not just the messaging but the word choice and the line breaks and where the commas went. In a strict sense, it was micromanagement. But I’d been taught micromanagement was bad, and this didn’t feel bad. It felt empowering. It showed me up close the kind of precision and care that was required to build a generationally transformative company, and it instilled the desire in me to bring that same precision and care to my own work. It gave me an appetite for building.
Done well, founder mode begets what we might call cofounder mode: a pervasive sense of shared ownership over outcomes shared by all employees, not just those whose name is on the incorporation papers.
The best companies instill this spirit in everyone, and it is the only way I have ever seen companies scale without calcifying into a nightmare of middle management. Indeed, I think it is perhaps the actual secret sauce at the heart of founder mode — for no one likes a micromanager, but many people deeply appreciate being the apprentice of a brilliant person, that they may one day soon become quite so brilliant themselves.
Lately, much of my work has revolved around talent branding. Great leaders can, in this environment, secure funding and even customers with relative ease, but attracting great talent is more difficult than it has ever been. Why should someone who could easily get funding for their own idea from Y Combinator or General Catalyst — or alternately, join a frontier lab for a sum so eyewateringly staggering they’re probably obligated to take it out of some moral obligation to their bloodline — join your Series A startup?
The best answer is that they will learn things from you they can’t learn elsewhere — that your company is where they can study in cofounder mode that they might one day themselves be better equipped to enter founder mode.
This is also what keeps people from leaving as your company grows. A company can continue to operate as nimbly at 4,000 as 40 if (and only if) employees continue to feel that they have a great stake on the company’s success — if they are both empowered and obligated to impose their vision of excellence on their part of the world.
The irony and the beauty, of course, is that the more cofounders you create in your company, the less of the micromanage-y parts of founder mode you have to partake in. In this way, cofounder mode is both the inevitable product of and the thing that obviates founder mode.