This article was written by Ken Leaver who comes from a product & commercial background. He has founded multiple companies and held senior product positions at SEA tech companies like Lazada and Pomelo Fashion.
Ken runs his own agency that helps early stage companies execute faster and cheaper. Check out his linkedin at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenleaver/
Guest Author: Ken Leaver
So this ‘Founder mode’ hype has died down a little bit at this point but is still very much talked about.
And i’d watched this Lenny’s podcast episode (link to video) sometime back when it was right at the beginning of the hype cycle. Brian talked about what he meant by “Founder’s” mode and I very much agreed with pretty much everything he was saying.
But then as I saw all the social media posts and discussions that happened afterwards, I very much disagreed with how a lot of people were interpreting it.
Mainly because what Brian talks about with ‘Founder’ mode upholds almost all the same principles that I talk about the ‘Beast method.’ But in my view it has almost zero to do with whether you are the founder or whether you are just a manager.
Rather it is about whether you systematically get down into the details.
That is the crux of what Brian talks about each time i’ve heard him describe it.
Today i’ll dive into this topic further.
So what exactly is ‘Founder mode’?
There are many interpretations out there. There’s what Brian originally said, there is how Paul Graham interpreted it in his essay, there is how others have interpreted it, etc.
So I asked ChatGPT to define it for us:
Now let’s draw out the core elements:
- A ‘hands-on approach’ that includes engaging deeply into every part of the company
- Being closely involved to guide the team while avoiding micromanagement
Founder’s mode applies almost the same exact principles as the ‘Beast Method’
Think about what I am saying with the ‘Beast Method’ for several years now.
I am basically laying out an exact process to follow to achieve exactly what Brian is saying. And that process operates by these principles:
- Literally everything is a task (in a system like Clickup)
- All work is an update to a task (comments, etc.) and all key stakeholders are following those updates
- Everyone, including the Founder/CEO, is keeping their notification inbox clean
- Each leader can have up to 40 direct reports with this system so mgmt layers are reduced.
- Almost no recurring meetings are needed anymore if this is done correctly.
If you do this… i guarantee you will achieve what Brian is saying.
Hell… i bet I can out ‘Founder’s mode’ Brian with this method because I will achieve the things he is saying far more efficiently.
For example, I would not do ‘skip-level meetings’… i’d just have visibility into all of the tasks that the folks two levels below me are doing and comment on them directly anytime i want.
Without having to create or join a meeting.
And trust me… having seen both ways of doing it… my way works much better.
I’ve seen many founders apply ‘Founder’s mode’ wrongly
In the past ~13 years working with lots of startups I’ve seen how lots of different founders operate. And i can tell you right now that many of them are going to misinterpret ‘Founder’s mode’.
Many of them, especially the non-systematic ones, are going to think to themselves…
“I am the founder. Therefore I know how best to navigate the strategy of this company as I’m the most invested into it. And I need to therefore dive deep into the details sometimes and show that I am in the details.”
Then they are going to run off and do exactly that for awhile.
They’re going to have skip-level meetings and ask lots of questions about details. Thinking that they are Elon Musk or Steve Jobs.
They’re going to tell people that they are wrong and tell them what to do.
They’re going to create drama and put pressure on people.
And the sum result of this is going to be that they just made more of a mess and achieved pretty much nothing.
You cannot apply ‘Founder’s mode’ correctly without being systematic
Why do the founders that do what I mention above achieve nothing?
Because they didn’t do it systematically. They just dove into meetings without having a lot of the context and started tinkering.
They weren’t able to have that context because there were lots of other meetings and foundational things that the team was doing that they were not privvy to.
Unless you’re able to stay on top of the pulse of what a team is doing over a long period of time… diving deep into the minutae of a specific topic is going to be a waste of time.
They will just answer what the CEO/Founder wants to hear but change little to nothing. It’s like putting up a Potemkin’s Village.
I’ve seen it so many times. And when I recall the founders/CEO’s that did this they almost all universally sucked. And their results sucked.
A team wouldn’t see them for weeks or even months and then all of a sudden they’d show up in a meeting picking on little details and creating lots of follow-up actions.
Then they’d disappear for weeks and most of those actions will have vanished into thin air.
After a few rounds of this the team literally laughs at this process with jokes like.. “Oh this circus again” hahaha
You don’t need to be a Founder to apply ‘Founder’s mode’
With ‘Beast mode’ I never talk about whether a person is a founder or not because it is completely unrelated in my view.
You don’t need to be a founder to stay on top of the details of your team systematically and care about the results.
Some managers have in fact done this far better than founders in my experience.
For example I haven’t been been a ‘founder’ to many of my clients these past four years.. yet I still very much consider that I was in ‘founder’s mode’ to the teams and projects that I was managing.
I knew exactly what was going on all of the time.
I was commenting almost real-time whenever I disagreed with something.
I was steering constantly by helping to re-prioritise tasks and unblocking.
This shit to me is founder’s mode.
Closing thoughts
My point with this article is that ‘Founder’s mode’ is about getting into the details systematically.
Because unless it is systematic it is in my experience not very useful.
The problem with doing this systematically for most founders and CEO’s is time management.
How the hell do you stay on top of the details of so many teams and people without driving yourself nuts and working all of the time?
And that my friends is where I think ‘Beast mode’ and similar concepts will completely change the game in the coming decades.
