In his essay “Founder Mode,” Paul Graham argues that the conventional wisdom about scaling startups — by hiring professional managers and delegating authority — often does more harm than good.

He suggests that founders must stay deeply involved in their companies’ operations, even if it means upending traditional org charts and management practices. While Graham offers valuable insights into an underappreciated leadership style, his perspective ultimately feels incomplete.

The most effective approach to scaling likely involves a hybrid of founder vision and managerial discipline — a “leader mode” that adapts to the company’s evolving context.

Graham’s core argument is compelling: founders bring unique insight, moral authority, and a customer-centric mindset that hired executives often lack. Airbnb’s Brian Chesky discovered this the hard way when he followed the standard playbook of delegating to seasoned operators, only to see core parts of the business deteriorate.

Chesky had to adopt a much more hands-on “founder mode,” inspired by Steve Jobs’ example at Apple, to get Airbnb back on track. Other successful founders report similar experiences, suggesting there’s real wisdom in Graham’s contrarian view. When it comes to setting vision, making tough calls, and course-correcting fast, founders have an edge that even the most impressive resumes can’t replicate.

However, it’s a stretch to suggest that founder mode is universally superior to professional management. For every Jobs or Chesky who succeeds with a highly centralized, CEO-centric structure, there are counterexamples of founders who take it too far.

Think of Travis Kalanick’s hard-charging leadership at Uber, which built a $60B company and created a toxic culture that ultimately led to his ouster. Or consider how Facebook’s “move fast and break things” ethos, while powering rapid growth, has also saddled it with huge regulatory and public trust deficits that more established processes might have avoided. Clearly, founder mode is no panacea.

Part of the problem is that founder mode works best when the founder has Job-level talent and instincts. However, most founders, even the most successful ones, have blind spots and development areas. As Ben Horowitz argues in “The Hard Thing About Hard Things,” founding CEOs often need experienced executives to fill critical skill gaps and provide “adult supervision” as the company matures.

Even Bill Gates, perhaps the ultimate example of a founder maintaining tight control as his startup scaled, brought in professional CEO Steve Ballmer to help impose management rigour on Microsoft in the 1980s and 1990s. Insisting that founders just follow their gut and ignore org-chart “best practices” underestimates how hard it is to make that work without the right team.

There’s also something a bit dangerous about the founder worship that Graham’s argument can feed into if taken to an extreme. When founders believe their vision and intuition trumps all else, it can breed a culture of sycophancy and discourage dissent.

Yes, the most impactful founders lead with strong convictions. But the best ones also remain open to feedback, even (perhaps especially) when it challenges their preconceptions. As a company grows, preserving that openness often requires empowering other leaders and welcoming debate, not concentrating all authority on one person.

While Graham rightly praises Jobs’ example, it’s worth remembering that Apple’s board fired Jobs in 1985 partly because of his mercurial management style. Only after 12 years in the wilderness did a more mature Jobs return to lead Apple to its greatest triumphs.

So what’s the alternative? Neither pure founder mode nor professional management mode seems optimal for a scaling startup’s complex, evolving challenges. The real opportunity may lie in a hybrid “leader mode” that combines the best of both worlds.

In this model, founders remain the ultimate drivers of vision and culture, but they also build a strong senior team and delegate substantial authority. They stay close to the details in areas with unique insight but otherwise trust their executives to hire and lead their teams.

They set a few simple rules and cultural norms but avoid micromanaging or overruling decisions arbitrarily. Most importantly, they adapt their leadership approach as the company evolves, becoming more of a coach and chief strategist than a commander as the scale increases.

We can see glimpses of this “leader mode” in some of today’s most successful founder-led companies. Jeff Bezos is famous at Amazon for his ultra-high standards and customer obsession, but he’s also built a highly decentralized structure that empowers leaders to innovate within their domains.

At Stripe, John and Patrick Collison have assembled an impressive management bench while still driving key product and partnership initiatives themselves.

At Speedinvest, a top European VC firm founded by former operators, the leadership team strives to give portfolio founders room to run while providing targeted support and governance in hiring, expansion, and team-building.

The throughline is a dynamic, situational leadership style that channels the founder’s vision and values while continually evolving the operating model and decision-making processes.

Founder mode, in short, is powerful but incomplete.

Romanticizing the founder’s unique strengths risks downplaying the founder’s equally unique limitations and the real challenges of leading a rapidly scaling organization. Manager mode, for its part, brings necessary structure and scalable processes, but often at the cost of vision, speed, and customer connection.

The synthesis is a flexible “leader mode” that keeps the founder’s purpose and passion at the heart of the company while building the team and systems needed to execute with excellence. It’s not easy, but for ambitious founders who want to go the distance, mastering this dual operating system – part visionary, part delegator, always driving forward – is the surest path to enduring impact.

(img: Financial Times)