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There is no such thing as "conventional wisdom". Wisdom will guide you to treat convention not as instruction, but as input - one of many.

PG did not go far enough here. The problem isn't 'bad advice', the problem is that advice is no substitute for thinking. Neither is looking at what Steve Jobs did at Apple for that matter: what really works is to think about all of this, considering problems from multiple angles.

However, as Bertrand Russel said:

“Most people would rather die than think and many of them do!”

Which also applies to businesses!

   Indeed, another prediction I'll make about founder mode is that once we figure out what it is, we'll find that a number of individual founders were already most of the way there — except that in doing what they did they were regarded by many as eccentric or worse.

Based on that quote, here's my attempt to define 'founder mode' in terms of what TFA is suggesting: be an independent thinker. Does it sound like common sense? It probably is. But remember what Charles Munger said:

    The so-called common sense is common sense that ordinary people do not have. When we say that someone has common sense, we are actually saying that he has common sense that ordinary people do not have. People think that it is easy to have common sense, but in fact it is very difficult.