The tech world is abuzz with talk of “founder mode” this week, but not everyone in Silicon Valley feels like they can embrace this management strategy.
Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s CEO, recently gave a talk that inspired Paul Graham, a founding partner at startup accelerator Y Combinator, to publish an essay Sunday on founder mode, which he describes as a way of running a company that involves being more hands-on rather than delegating to a small number of direct reports.
Chesky stepped in after countless comments on social media about the concept.
“Female founders have reached out to me in the last 24 hours to say they are not allowed to run their companies in founder mode like men do,” he said in a message on X. “This needs to change.”
When asked what he meant by “permission,” Chesky shared a screenshot of a 2020 Business Insider headline that read, “The fall of female bosses is actually a good thing.” (The article is about a series of female founders who have resigned amid allegations of toxic work culture.)
Chesky also retweeted female founders who said women who practice founder mode were canceled for it.
In his essay on founder mode, Graham describes it as an alternative strategy to “manager mode,” which he says is how most companies are run. He explains that the idea behind manager mode is to “hire good people and give them the opportunity to do their job,” but in practice it often means “hiring professional imposters and letting them run the company into bankruptcy.”
Chesky, who co-founded Airbnb in 2008, said in another X post that he was inspired to adopt Founder Mode by Jony Ive and Hiroki Asai, both former Apple executives. He also said that founders who embody many of Founder Mode’s principles include Steve Jobs, Walt Disney and Elon Musk.
businessinsider
