Top 10 quotes from Paul Graham’s viral essay: ‘Founder mode vs manager mode’ | Trending
Sep 04, 2024 10:31 AM Investor Paul Graham challenged conventional B-school wisdom as he spoke about the “Founder Mode” in his widely-discussed essay. Investor Paul Graham recently published an essay titled “Founder Mode” that has been widely discussed the start-up ecosystem in Silicon Valley as well as India. The 59-year-old co-founder of accelerator Y Combinator, calls all leaders to run their companies in the “founder mode” instead of the “manager mode”. The latter, which is conventional B-school wisdom, said founders must switch to manager mode if they wanted to scale up their companies. The leaders, according to this school of thought, would not get into the smaller details and would rather prefer to delegate. Paul Graham wrote about the founder mode on his blog. Here are top 10 quotes from Paul Graham’s “Founder Mode” essay: In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode. The way managers are taught to run companies seems to be like modular design in the sense that you treat subtrees of the org chart as black boxes. Founders feel like they’re being gaslit from both sides — the people telling them they have to run their companies like managers, and the people working for them when they do. Whatever founder mode conss of, it’s pretty clear that it’s going to break the principle that the CEO should engage with the company only via his or her direct reports. So founder mode will be more complicated than manager mode. But it will also work better. We already know that from the examples of individual founders groping their way toward it. Look at what founders have achieved already, and yet they’ve achieved this against a headwind of bad advice. Imagine what they’ll do once we can tell them how to run their companies like Steve Jobs instead of John Sculley. Get Latest Updates on… See more News / Trending / Top 10 quotes from Paul Graham’s viral essay for all bosses: ‘Founder mode vs manager mode’
