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Yet another new buzzword has hit the world of startups, dividing the already fractious Silicon Valley community over the best way to manage a growing company.
Noted entrepreneur Paul Graham recently published an essay detailing the differences between “manager mode” and “founder mode” — claiming with regard to the latter that “business schools don’t know it exists.”
In his essay, Graham recounted an experience he had listening to Airbnb founder Brian Chesky speak at a conference held by Graham’s startup accelerator Y Combinator.
“As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised [Chesky] that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale,” Graham recounted. “Their advice could be optimistically summarized as ‘hire good people and give them room to do their jobs.’ He followed this advice and the results were disastrous.”
Chesky and Airbnb were able to rebound, according to its founder, by instead emulating the leadership style at Apple.
Rather than acting like a manager and delegator as Apple grew from a startup into a major company, Steve Jobs stayed in “founder mode.” He continued to stay involved in the company at all levels, rather than communicating solely with his direct reports.
“Jony Ive and Hiroki Asia from Apple inspired me to adopt founder mode,” Chesky posted to X on Wednesday. “Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, and Elon Musk embody many of the principles.”
Graham argues that startup founders have been “gaslit” by two groups of people: “VCs who haven’t been founders themselves [who] don’t know how founders should run companies” and C-suite level executives who “as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the world.”
While the essay garnered praise from many among the Silicon Valley elite, it also was almost immediately subject to mockery from people online, many of whom have grown weary of the endless strings of buzzwords and the tech industry players who use them.
More seriously, some argue that taking an all-or-nothing, founder-or-manager approach is inherently flawed.
“People love making things black and white when the world runs in a lot of different shades of truth,” Hussein Kanji, a founder and partner at venture capital firm Hoxton Ventures, told Business Insider. “People have lost their ability to engage with seemingly contradictory ideas at the same time.”
