Founder mode
published on 2024/09/02
Obviously founders can't keep running a 2000 person company the way they ran it when it had 20. There's going to have to be some amount of delegation. Where the borders of autonomy end up, and how sharp they are, will probably vary from company to company. They'll even vary from time to time within the same company, as managers earn trust. So founder mode will be more complicated than manager mode. But it will also work better. We already know that from the examples of individual founders groping their way toward it.
Indeed, another prediction I'll make about founder mode is that once we figure out what it is, we'll find that a number of individual founders were already most of the way there — except that in doing what they did they were regarded by many as eccentric or worse.
SilverKey is still run in founder mode. We focus on sustainability and we move fast. Our co-founder is very involved in training our Summer interns for example. They are still in involved in projects from very low level to high levels.