| I'll share a different perspective to this whole founder mode debate: my instinct is that "founder mode" is a useless phrase and founders can be equal parts helpful or detrimental. The leaders who we would generally uphold as being highly successful founders who built respectable companies didn't necessarily do so through something intrinsic to being a founder, but rather by deeply _giving a shit_ about the products they build and the customer experiences of those products. It follows that founders (or employees who were early enough to have a founding mentality), often, tend to care more about their products and services than anyone else will and this can lead to centralized decision making being highly effective. This is the case for Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Howard Schultz, Brian Chesky, and Elon Musk (please set aside any recent personal opinions of him). It also follows that "manager" CEOs and senior leaders are often hired into a role with different incentives that relate far less to them caring about the product, customer, or business, and more to the movement of specific metrics. In these cases, centralized decision making can lead to deterioration of a product experience to the point of irrelevance. This list might include Scott Thompson (Yahoo), Dennis Muilenburg (Boeing), etc. I don't believe it is anything inherent to a "founder" or "manager." Simply put: centralized decision making can be effective in an organization where the centralized decision maker has the insights and is close enough to the customer and market to make good decisions. It can be massively detrimental if the person is detached from the customer and market. It is just the case that a founder happens to be much more likely to be close to the customer and the market than a hired leader, and likely has much more of a desire to be so. This might be wrong, but it has tracked in my career so far. I've seen great managers, horrible managers, great founders, and horrible founders. The only thing that has been consistent is that the great ones are _far_ more likely to deeply understand the customer they serve and the product they build than the bad ones. |