Paul Graham's founder mode essay injected founders with energy: It gave founders permission to take charge and correct what's wrong — even if business book authors disagree.
But it's easy to feel inspired. Actually making those changes is hard: Sometimes, you won't feel the confidence you want to project. You'll be called a micromanager. You'll slip back into manager mode (for good reason sometimes).
To discover the messy reality of founder mode, we spoke to 4 YC founders about how they put founder mode into practice, the challenges that come with it and how it affected their startups.
Want to find out what founder mode looks like in practice? Let's dive in:
Aakash Shah, co-founder & CEO at Wyndly
Aakash co-founded Wyndly (YC W21), which helps allergy sufferers with at-home allergy tests and treatments.
His first insight dispels a myth of entrepreneurship: That you need to remove yourself from the details eventually to focus on higher-level, more strategic things:
"Founder Mode is about giving yourself, as the founder, the permission to stay involved in the details and the day-to-day operations. It's about staying close to the ground because that's where you excel. It's where you understand your customers better and know your product more intimately. So you use the instincts you've developed from taking your business from 0 to 10, to propel it from 10 to 10 million.Founder Mode gives me the permission to think from first principles and discard some of the unnecessary complexities we've inevitably accumulated.
Founder mode gives me the permission to say, let's think from first principles and throw away some of our cruft that we have inevitably built up."
Manager mode advocates would tell you that staying "close to the ground" isn't worth it - that founders should spend their time on the more strategic things as soon as someone else is owning the lower-level things. But Aakash knows that doesn't work. That's why he stays close to the basics:
"Personally, I'm always in founder mode when it comes to our marketing. When it comes to testing marketing channels, I always get really into it for the initial launch. I don't just hand it off. I want to ramp myself up and get good enough at the marketing channel to get us those first $100,000-$200,000 in sales.For example, for organic TikTok: we started making our own TikToks, and I was editing the initial videos for SEO. I'm getting in and learning how to use SEO and figuring out, "oh, this what's the difference maker."On the product side, recently, when it comes to all of the technology innovation with LLMs, Founder Mode is digging deep and saying, "Hey, how can we improve our processes with LLMs? What are the wins we can take that we might initially discard if we were using staid principles and just moving from prior experience?"
These are great examples of founder mode. One that especially stands out to me is understanding what makes the difference on a given workstream. Even if you eventually get more distance from the workstream, to effectively manage someone you need to know what enables them to do their best work.
Aakash also told us how he keeps the company from slipping into manager mode:
"Basically, the way we have avoided manager mode is by not hiring managers and instead relying on efficiency gains to drive the scaling our people. Everyone is still keeping 1 foot on the ground. This used to be a lot harder when you could only scale your effort through people and more hiring. But by giving everyone access to Ops Agents and LLM Agents, it's a lot easier to keep the team in Founder Mode instead of manager mode. This has a side benefit of driving a documentation-first culture which is a core requirement to succeed at remote companies."
This insight should be obvious, but isn't: To keep too much management from happening, sidestep the need for management by hiring fewer people (we have a similar stance on this at Command AI).
Talking about AI as augmentation rather than replacement for knowledge workers isn't novel anymore. But with AI agents and other LLM-powered apps, we're entering an age where one person can do what a team used to do. That requires finding the right people. Here's how Aakash hires people that can avoid manager mode:
"Manager mode people always make excuses. They don't want to get their hands dirty. They always want to work through other people. We look for folks who are willing to get their hands dirty, who are willing to get their hands into the data and start implementing changes themselves. Basically, it comes down to having high-agency."
But other founders do it differently:
Syam Anupom from Tackle
Tackle (YC W21) automates calendar auditing. Its founder Syam Anupom told us how he uses founder mode:
"A few months back, our sales/CX got excited about a big prospect that seemed perfect on paper. But I dug in and realized they lacked a clear use case, and engaging them would only distract us from core customers with real needs. Although the team didn’t get it at first, vetoing the sale kept us focused on those who truly need our solution - and also made everyone understand what to prioritize."
There are two important things to see here: Founder mode can often mean going against incentives. Everyone in a company is incentivized to bring in new customers — especially sales.
One of the most important facets of founder mode is making hard decisions that go against your short-term interests, but benefit your long-term vision. Anyone in manager mode would think "This sale will look good on my quarterly report" and go through with it, but not see the opportunity cost of distracting from the core business.
That also applies to Tackle's product:
"More recently, we are building a new AI-driven feature everyone was excited about. But I wasn’t convinced. The solution felt too complex, so I started talking to users myself, going over mockups. Turns out, users wanted something completely different. So we course-corrected fast, built a simpler solution that we could iterate on with real feedback (we’re launching it in a few weeks)."
There are parallels to what Aakash told us here: In founder mode, you need to be able to get your hands dirty. If Syam was in manager mode, he would've simply trusted a PM to have done the best job possible.
At this point, it's worth addressing a common rebuttal to founder mode. People will call it micromanagement. They'll say it's annoying to work with a founder in founder mode. And that may well be true.
If you worked on a feature for weeks, you'd probably hate for that to be canned. If you were a salesperson close to a juicy commission, you'd hate for that sale to be vetoed.
But one of the most important parts of startups is that everyone's working to make the startup succeed, not to adorn your resume with another product launch. When we asked Syam how he keeps the company from slipping into mnager mode, he told us this:
"To counter this, we focus on “hyper alignment” - founders not only sharing high-level context but also diving into the details when needed. This way, the team understands how we make micro-decisions, which helps them make faster, better decisions on their own from bottom up.
Again, lots of parallels with Wyndly's Aakash. Syam continues:
We also push for “radical thinking” - before any big decision, we ask questions like: what if we deliver this in 3 days instead of 3 weeks, or what if we don’t pursue this sale or build that feature? On top of that, leaders audit their calendars to make sure there's room for spontaneity and that most of our time is spent selling or building."
While a regular calendar audit is also the core part of Tackle's product, it's a great way to ensure you reiterate your priorities as well — in this case, building and selling. But the people who can operate this way don't grow on trees. Syam had to learn finding the right people the right way:
"I learned the hard way: by making mistakes. Now, we hire builders and problem solvers for every role - people with a bias toward action. Startup success is about running experiments fast, which means making quick decisions and executing quickly. So we look for people who thrive in that environment. One question we ask in interviews is, “what’s the fastest you’ve ever taken an idea from concept to launch?” or we put them in a situation where they have to make a decision quickly with little information - that tells us how they handle uncertainty, work with limited data and whether they’ll jump into action."
Next, we spoke to Jinjing Liang.
How Stably's Jinjing Liang does founder mode
Jinjing Liang is the co-founder and CEO of Stably, an AI-powered app that runs tests on websites and web apps. She previously co-founded Lovecast, which built livestreaming technology for weddings.
One of her most important learnings from her previous startup was that running your startup like a big company never works:
“I think we overly focused on formal procedures, being very democratic with the process, vetoing things, when in a startup, you're supposed to experiment. I call this founder mode too—I make the final decision, and I'm usually inclined to just try things.”
This was largely driven by hiring the wrong people:
“We didn’t hire people who were open to feedback, self-sufficient, smart, and not overly defensive. They would start a fight when asked to change something. My previous hires were experienced but resisted feedback, especially during the prototype phase. Previously, I was over-indexing on people with, say, digital marketing experience. They can think strategically, but their creative vision didn’t align with the company.”
Now Jinjing focuses less on work experience and prioritizes having the right attitude:
“I make sure I get the right people and ensure a culture fit. They need to be okay with me engaging in founder mode, to not treat that as micromanagement, but more like I'm partnering with them in crafting all the pieces."
This also goes into the interview process:
“I ask deep screening questions. I ask them to go through every job experience and ask what their manager thought of them and what they thought of their manager. Also, I mention that we’ll do a background check, so they tend to be pretty honest. Through that, I can get a sense of how they view their environment or if they thought their manager was micromanaging.”
To stay up to date with the day-to-day work at Stably, Jinjing stays close to the nitty gritty at all times:
"I’m committed to being more involved in the day-to-day details. I also make sure to talk with one customer every day myself. It gives me insight from both marketing and product sides, and helps ensure the team understands this is a collaborative environment where everyone helps each other. It’s about helping, not micromanaging.”
Finally, we spoke to Kraftful's Yana Welinder.
How Kraftful's Yana Welinder does founder mode
I first asked Yana how she engaged founder mode in her company — Kraftful (YC S19), a copilot for product managers. Here's what she told me:
"I focus on identifying areas where I have unique intuition as the founder of Kraftful and design workflows that allow me to act on those intuitions. This doesn’t mean I avoid delegating work in those areas; rather, I stay closely involved where my impact would be most significant. For example, I take the lead in designing our onboarding experience and other critical parts of the product, and I personally close big enterprise deals where my founder’s touch can make a difference. On the other hand, I fully delegate tasks where my involvement wouldn’t necessarily add value, like many operational tasks, freeing up bandwidth to stay in the details where it matters most. My approach to founder mode isn’t about being in the weeds on everything – it’s about trusting your intuition and staying deeply involved where you can be most impactful."
When I asked her how she wants to keep the company from slipping into manager mode as it grows, she told me about the company's core values:
"One of our core values at Kraftful is “Always pragmatic, never dogmatic.” I see manager mode as a form of dogma – a rigid set of corporate rules that can take hold as a company scales. We actively avoid imposing unnecessary rules and processes. Instead, we start with the problem and focus on solving it in the most practical way. This mindset helps prevent the team from slipping into manager mode."
Finally, I asked her how she found people taht could operate the company like founders. Here's her response:
"We seek out pragmatic individuals who are more excited about making an impact than managing people. While we value exceptional leaders and mentors, we try to avoid those with a “manager mode” mentality – the type that’s primarily focused on maximizing headcount and operating independently of the founder, often without considering the broader impact on the company. This mindset is common in larger corporations, where executives and middle managers sometimes define themselves by the size of the team they manage. For a startup, that should always be a red flag."
How YC founders do founder mode
I really enjoyed talking to all these 4 YC founders. Here are my top takeaways to stay in founder mode:
- Always stay close to the nitty gritty. Never think you're above doing any work.
- Find great people who can emulate founder mode.
- Fight manager mode with everything you've got.
I hope this article was useful in illustrating what founder mode looks like in practice for 4 YC founders. I'm sure their companies will be successful if they keep it up — and I'm sure yours will, too. If you stay in founder mode.
