Scaling Founder Mode

“Founder mode at its core, though, is about the single principle to be in the details. Great leadership is presence, not absence. So to go back to my lesson, it is not good for you to hire great people and trust them to do their job. How do you know if they’re doing a good job if you’re not?” - Brian Chesky

When I first heard about founder mode I clinched defensively. I’ve been a VP and CMO previously and my ego refused to believe that a CEO “in the details” as Chesky describes was anything but a micromanager.

Then, just like Charlie Munger suggests in Poor Charlie’s Almanac, I realized I must invert, and then invert again. In other words, what does a company look like that doesn’t have Founder Mode dialed up?

They probably have lots of layers, especially in management, like the middle level managers that Amazon said they were trying to get rid of with their recent layoffs.

They probably have committees, like the ones Steve Jobs advocated for so that Apple would be “run by ideas, not hierarchy.” In fact, if you watch Chesky’s interview with Keith Rabois for long enough, Chesky gives credit to a meeting with both Jonny Ives & Hiroki Asai, both former Apple leaders, as the moment when the seed which flowered into founder mode was planted.

So ok, through that lens of less layers and beuracracy, Brian Chesky’s Founder becomes more tangible and less triggering to those of us who have been in the trenches with a CEO before.

But it isn’t just Apple’s org design principle but a number of concepts that have culminated into founder mode.

“One Thing”

As someone who is completely unable of multi-tasking I’ve really embraced Peter Thiel’s principle of “one thing”. Keith Rabois, a former Thiel employee, shared, “Peter required that everyone be tasked with exactly one priority. He would refuse to discuss virtually anything else with you except what was currently assigned as your #1 initiative.”

The One Thing principle requires 10x focus with an aim of resulting in 10x execution. However, it also requires 10x prioritization which is often a shared if not top-down driven responsibility. In other words, the CEO must be disciplined enough to delegate only one thing at a time.

Who hasn’t been in a situation where your boss or CEO has demanded you to take on an urgent & important project IN ADDITION to two or three projects already in motion?

The one thing principle is more a sign of a great leader than a forcing function for employees. It reveals whether an individual leader has done the hard work required to provide clarity and hired the right people to entrust completely. Which leads us too another key principle hidden within Founder Mode…

Single Threaded Ownership

Jeff Bezos has contributed a number of organizational principles to the world including the two pizza rule (no meeting should need more than 2 pizza boxes to feed its attendees) and single threaded ownership.

”A single-threaded leader is an individual wholly dedicated to solving one business problem, someone who wakes up in the morning and worries just about that one thing, ensuring the initiative’s vision and goals are always at the forefront and is ready to escalate risks early.” link

Again, these aren’t entirely new concepts. Steve Jobs when discussing his no committees rule goes on to say that Apple is “organized like a startup. One person is in charge of iPhone OS software, one person is in charge of Mac hardware, one person is in charge of iPhone hardware engineering, another person is in charge of worldwide marketing, another person is in charge of operations.”

There was strict delegation, strict accountability, and strict autonomy. Jobs trusted his leaders.

Uber’s perfection of single threaded ownership

The most striking experience I’ve had with single threaded ownership was at Uber. I joined Uber after its blitz scaling phase and shortly after the company’s founder, Travis Kalanick, had left but his fingerprints were still noticeably fresh.

My company had been acquired by Uber and I, as the marketer, began to open doors inside what Uber at that time called its central marketing team. It was a hot mess. No clear leadership, no clear processes, and lots of fragmentation - especially geographically. I soon learned that a central marketing department never even existed during Uber’s blitz scaling days.

I was shocked and inexplicably angry, “how dare they grow without a well functioning marketing team?!” I asked myself. But soon inverted, “wait, how DID they grow without a well functioning marketing team?”

There are many first-hand stories of what it was like to grow Uber during these days but all of them point back to a city playbook with individuals assigned high autonomy. Uber didn’t grow from the top-down or the bottoms-up rather than from the edges-in as it rapidly launched in a new city almost daily. Each city an outpost feeding data and direction back to HQ rather than the HQ operating as a quarterback telling each city how to scale.

There were war stories where a GM and their team would launch a promo completely unvetted and unchecked by anyone back in HQ. If an HQ marketing resources wasn’t available the GM could use their own budget and hire their own set of freelancers and agencies. Brand guidelines? Marketing SOPs? Fuck that.

Their autonomy wasn’t isolated to marketing either.

Fast forward to now and it’s clear that each GM of Uber was operating in Founder Mode before the phrase was coined. Travis the coach of many quarterbacks all at once.

It’s clear, to me at least, that the concept of GMs is actually the key to scaling Founder Mode within a company.

Scaling Founder Mode

All companies start with a founder and their product vision. And sometimes that singular founder, with their singular product, and singular operation can get a company very far - maybe $1M, maybe $100M, or even $1B in sales. Up until this point the company is just one GM in founder mode by default.

But then each company must continue to grow and must either enter a new market (like Uber did with each city) or launch a new product (like Uber did again with Uber Eats).

This exact moment is a make or break moment for determining the organizational and cultural directional a company will take.

Will a founder have the strength to entrust someone else to be wholly responsible for a new initiative?

Will a founder have the resolve to allow someone else to shake the tree and likely upset cross-functional teams?

Will the company be managed by committees or will it evolve from one person in founder mode to a small squad of leaders in founder mode?

Good Mantras

“Remember only the disciplined ones are free in life. If you are undisciplined you are a slave to your moods, you are a slave to your passions.”

- Eliud Kipchoge

Good Reads

ChatGPT is now Chat.com

Good Listens

Vampire Weekend - Connect

Popform update.

I continue to build Popform with the team. I’ve become more emboldened to LinkedIn announce my own founder role with Popform.

We’re re-imagining paperwork. Good things take time. Public forms and templates with free filling and e-sign will be live this month.

We launched a new homepage at popform.io - please join the waitlist.

About lowercase

Lowercase is a growth consulting & squad for startups specialized in growth strategy, web design & development, SEO, content creation, and paid media. I personally jump in as a full-stack and hands-on growth/revenue advisor depending on if I like your project and my capacity.