Paul Grahams recent piece on Airbnb’s Brian Chesky went viral. In short, Chesky hired poor managers and now follows more the Steve Jobs model of having a more direct impact.
Founder mode vs Manager mode. This is so obvious that I wonder why it is new to people.
We’ve all been there. If you hire people as a founder, you’re looking for entrepreneurs. Every single one of Qype’s C-Level team during my tenure went on to found their own double / triple digit million startup.
We’ve all made the mistake of hiring a corporate animal that is perfect at exaggerating their own positive impact.
We are building startups precisely because we don’t want to get sucked into corporate culture and yet we fall into that trap of ‘growing up’, often following bad advice.
So how can you tell if your organization is growing up in founder mode way or just adding fat?
Some hints:
- Founder mode has few meetings. Clearly defined responsibilities limit the need to constantly coordinate.
- Founder mode owes up to mistakes and gets on with it – the opposite of corporate cover my ass.
- Founder mode has relentless focus on the customer and not on all the multiple stakeholders within. (“Oh this might alienate the design team who have worked so hard” vs “it is good enough when I will tell you so”.)
- Above all, founder mode is fast. If your deadline for the next meaningful iteration is a year out, you’ve lost the plot. Sergio Marchionne was told they would need 4 years to design the Fiat 500. They did it in 18 months.
