Founder Mode: why “doing what scales” sometimes doesn’t

Paul Graham’s Founder Mode article puts a name to something many founders experience as their company grows: the moment when following “best practices” starts making everything worse.

The standard scaling advice is familiar: hire strong leaders, delegate, don’t micromanage, and run the company through your direct reports. This works well if you’re a professional manager brought in to run a company you didn’t create.

But founders aren’t just managers. And treating them like ones can quietly break a startup.

Paul’s key insight is that there are actually two different operating modes: manager mode and founder mode. As startups scale, we’ve assumed founders must switch to manager mode. The problem is that founders have abilities managers don’t — deep product intuition, historical context, and the authority to cut through politics. When they stop using those, the company slows down and drifts.

This is why so many founders describe the experience as being “gaslit.” Everyone tells them to step back. When they do, quality drops, execution gets fuzzy, and reality gets filtered through layers of optimism.

Founder Mode breaks some sacred rules. It normalizes skip-level conversations. It allows founders to go deep into details when needed. It rejects the idea that the org chart should act like a set of sealed black boxes.

Steve Jobs’ famous retreats with the 100 most important people at Apple — regardless of title — are a great example. It’s heretical in manager mode, but powerful in founder mode.

Pedro Franceschi shows what this looks like in practice

Pedro Franceschi’s take from Brex is a concrete example of Founder Mode applied deliberately:

• A single roadmap for the entire company, edited by the founder
• No pure people-manager roles — leaders are expected to operate, not just coordinate
• Metrics viewed in the most punitive way possible, eliminating wishful thinking

The results speak loudly: growth twice as fast as a year ago, burn down 70% year-over-year, and founder energy at its highest point.

The real takeaway

Founder Mode isn’t about refusing to delegate or excusing bad behavior. Paul is clear that it can be misused. It’s about recognizing that founders can stay deeply involved without freezing the company.

Scaling doesn’t mean disappearing.
Structure shouldn’t hide reality.

We don’t fully understand Founder Mode yet — and that’s actually encouraging. Founders have built incredible companies despite years of bad advice. Imagine what happens once we finally learn how this mode really works.