[regularfry]

I don't see anything distinct enough to call "founder mode" here. It's just one (very important, but small) sub-facet of Ron Westrum's organisational typology. That specific behaviour, of a top-of-the-tree authority figure getting involved in the weeds, is just one behaviour he calls out as characterising generative cultures, but there are others: an eagerness to find mistakes is another important one.

This has become more popularised by DORA, but Westrum divides cultures into "Generative", "Bureaucratic", and "Pathological". Someone who finds a mistake is praised in a generative culture, ignored in a bureaucratic one, and blamed in a pathological one. The conventional "management"-type detail-hiding hierarchy would be absolutely stereotypical of bureaucratic or pathological cultures depending on the goal.

From that point of view I think this is better understood than you'd think, but possibly not well communicated.

[mempko]

What I'm disappointed by is that in the hundreds of years of capitalism, there has been little or no scientific research that looks at what structures create companies that have the desirable attributes we want. The fact that Paul Graham is now coining 'founder mode' without formulating any theory and approach to test what works (you would think VCs would be a group capable of doing this research) is disappointing.

The lack of any scientific rigor means we have founders floundering when building companies. For now we can just point to individual cases like Steve Jobs or Valve and have to guess why what they did worked. We are in the snake oil period of corporate governance.

[borroka]

"What I'm disappointed by is that in the hundreds of years of capitalism, there has been little or no scientific research that looks at what structures create companies that have the desirable attributes we want."

-- It may well be that, beyond the obvious, it depends on the broader social (how society is structured) and financial context, and the spirit of the times. The same could be said of all sorts of "how to's": how to get rich, how to be successful in life (the vagueness of which already throws a wrench into the engine of exploration), how to win at soccer/football/whatever sport or skill you are interested in.

While technology may open new horizons with capabilities that were not there before (think 4G and true mobile internet experience), one might ask why, looking back at the "primitive" ways sports were trained for and played 50 years ago, nobody had the intuition to propose ways of training and playing that are closer to what we see today. It did not require new technology, it needed a different way of thinking about the problem. But what scientific research, such as the one you propose to use to study how organizations win, would have allowed this thinking to emerge? And the same will probably be pondered 50 years from now when their ways will be compared to ours.