Top 10 quotes from Paul Graham’s viral essay for all bosses: ‘Founder mode vs manager mode’

Investor Paul Graham recently published an essay titled “Founder Mode” that has been widely discussed by 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.

Here are top 10 quotes from Paul Graham’s “Founder Mode” essay:

1. “In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode.”
2. “Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode.”
3. “There are as far as I know no books specifically about founder mode. Business schools don’t know it exists. All we have so far are the experiments of individual founders who’ve been figuring it out for themselves.”
4. “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.”
5. “Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it’s described that way, doesn’t it? Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.”
6. “Founders feel like they’re being gaslit from both sides — by the people telling them they have to run their companies like managers, and by the people working for them when they do.”
7. “Whatever founder mode consists 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.”
8. “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.”
9. “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.”

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