With ‘Founder Mode,’ Silicon Valley makes micromanaging cool

livemint.com:

People like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs at times seemed to have a je ne sais quoi that allowed them to act and behave as leaders of their companies in ways that would have tripped up mere mortals. This past week, Silicon Valley put a name to it: “Founder Mode." It’s a term coined by Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, an influential startup incubator in the San Francisco Bay Area.

He wrote an essay this month gaining a lot of attention in tech circles that pits his “Founder Mode" against what he calls “Manager Mode." Graham tries to put his finger on the special relationship entrepreneurs have with their companies that he argues outsiders just lack. Manager mode “is so much less effective that to founders it feels broken," he wrote.

“There are things founders can do that managers can’t, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because it is." To some, Founder Mode might sound a lot like micromanaging—the sort of thing cautioned against by business professors and management consultants. They warn such practices won’t scale as a business grows, can stifle grass-roots innovation and risk staff burnout and turnover.

But the case for Founder Mode is more than that: It challenges conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley that once a kid creates something great, that adults then need to be brought in to make it big. Instead, this principle argues that founders, by their very nature, can do things that professional managers can’t.

Founder Mode would say that is why Musk, considered a co-founder of Tesla, could bet the company on the idea of making an electric car mainstream with the Model 3 and change the automotive industry in the process. Or why the late Jobs could make his own similar gamble at Apple with the creation of the