Founder Mode: Elevating Individual Contributors
Contrary to many circulating opinions, Paul Graham's founder mode is a good thing—especially for individual contributors, and it certainly doesn’t mean you should micromanage anyone.
To understand why, think of the number of managers at a given organization as a continuum from zero to N, with N being the total number of employees:
On the left, no one's in charge. The number of managers is zero.
The next point as you move to the right represents one manager. The ratio of managers to total employees is 1:N. This describes a system of almost no management—just one central figure. This is founder mode. (You can also think of this as a benevolent dictatorship, if you are building an open source project.)
If you continue adding managers, you’ll eventually reach the point where everyone is a manager.
Looking at this continuum is already instructional, as you can see that founder mode is a long way off from any sort of aggressive surveillance state. There would have to be far more managers to pull that off. But before we go any further, I want to point out something important: The far left point of the continuum is the same as the far right point. In other words, when no one is a manager, everyone is.
So let's change our line to a circle to get a better picture of what's going on.
Now it's easier to put founder mode into its proper context. In reality, it's almost the exact opposite of the point of greatest concern: the full aristocracy at the bottom of the circle.
Many people are confused, thinking founder mode is some kind of authoritarian regime with heavy-handed control and constant surveillance. But that takes a lot of scaffolding. You need to appoint a lot of people to management to pull that off. Founder mode is much lighter and can’t support that kind of apparatus. It’s more about maintaining culture than giving orders.
The other side of the circle, however, tells a different story. When half the company is management, you've entered a dark place. That's like a school dance with one chaperone for every kid—awkward, over-managed, and no fun for anyone. In a corporation, it's a bloated hierarchy, full of politicking, standardizing, and productivity gaming. It's an organization full of black boxes and fiefdoms run by proxy-founders with plenty of "room to do their jobs"1—and enough room to "drive the company into the ground."2
The bottom of the circle is the global minimum of the system—the worst-case scenario. Not founder mode. Not by a long shot. Founder mode is way on the other side of the circle, where people are running lean and focused, just getting their work done.
From this global minimum—a fully loaded bureaucracy—things can only improve as you move upwards, whether left or right. If you move to the left, you remove managers, giving employees more autonomy and less surveillance—an obvious win.
Even when moving to the right, which might seem like it would worsen the ratio between management and individual contributors, things start improving. Because once you cross over the halfway point, you are headed towards making everyone a manager. And that’s also good. You start diluting the “manager” title. Like an authoritarian structure transitioning to a democratic one, you’re giving more and more people the right to vote. Or like adding more chaperones to the dance, eventually it's just a bunch of chaperones doing what they want. It becomes the chaperone’s dance.
A Good Founder
Not all founders are created equal. Some founders are bad news. If you get stuck with a bad one, it's an unfortunate situation. In this case, there’s little that can be done to right the ship until they’re replaced, which will happen eventually—but sometimes far too late.
But a good founder is a great blessing.
A good founder, engaged in founder mode, will protect the autonomy of individual contributors, not intrude on it.
A good founder has an innate trust in individual contributors. When management inevitably creeps in, a good founder will swat it down. When the standardization crew comes to "help the organization grow up," a good founder will block their power grab and break open their black boxes. They realize, like Steve Jobs, a founder mode guru, that:
It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.3
The company may even hire for management roles, but these managers won’t have traditional authority like they would in manager mode. Instead, they function more like individual contributors—helping, supporting, and facilitating. They are not allowed to direct or command. These are supportive roles, not directive ones. Once those managers capture manager-mode-authority, the company starts moving down the circle and founder mode begins to dissolve.
Paul Graham himself has stressed the importance of protecting individual contributors (or, as he often calls them, hackers or makers):
Something I told 9 yo: If you're a maker, resist being told what to do by people who aren't.4
Don't listen to marketing people or designers or product managers just because of their job titles. If they have good ideas, use them, but it's up to you to decide; software has to be designed by hackers who understand design, not designers who know a little about software.5
If you can find the right people, you only have to tell them what to do at the highest level. They'll handle the details. Indeed, they insist on it. For a project to feel like your own, you must have sufficient autonomy. You can't be working to order, or slowed down by bureaucracy.6
the greatest danger of applying too many checks to your programmers is not that you'll make them unproductive, but that good programmers won't even want to work for you.7
In Summary
I’m confident that Paul Graham has no interest in founders who micromanage individual contributors. He’s far more interested in founders who maintain the right kind of culture—even (especially) if that means kicking some would-be manager butt from time to time.
Founder mode is about preventing middle management from taking control, not exercising unhealthy authority. For an individual contributor, founder mode is a beautiful, liberating, and energizing experience.
https://paulgraham.com/foundermode.html
https://paulgraham.com/foundermode.html
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8586131-it-doesn-t-make-sense-to-hire-smart-people-and-then
https://x.com/paulg/status/1386220078958579713
https://paulgraham.com/road.html
https://paulgraham.com/own.html
https://paulgraham.com/artistsship.html