Founder mode can’t work. Be maximalist

The tech industry was recently abuzz with a post from Y Combinator founder Paul Graham on “founder mode.” In a nutshell, his concept explores the need for leaders to act in urgent, hands-on ways, and not surrender control to professional managers, who drive a founder’s company into the ground with their unimaginative, slow-moving ways.

Graham’s post earned praise from the likes of Elon Musk and Brian Chesky. There were indeed good things about his call for decisiveness, recognizing talent at all levels, and intra-corporate autonomy. At the same time, Graham only looked at wildly successful firms, not the majority of startups that go nowhere. Unchecked founder mode may well be disastrous.

As a founder who’s turned his startup into a public company, Graham’s piece resonates because there’s unprecedented urgency throughout our business lives. Many of you feel it, too. Today’s leaders and corporate cultures need something like the good parts of founder’s mode, with or without the founder, or they risk catastrophe.

That doesn’t mean people need to be tyrants or bullies, nor that urgency equals panic. I believe that we can cope with a few simple practices: Welcome all possibilities and paradoxes, have a sustaining for what you can become, and build a culture to realize that vision. Call this my “maximalist” approach. Instead of a single-control founder mode, the goal is for me and my teams to move swiftly, transparently, and decisively on the signals affecting us.

Acceleration is killing traditional product/market fit

Today’s urgency stretches from near-continuous updates of the smallest app to the lives of giant companies. Microsoft took 20 years to become a household name. Google became a public company in just six years after the company was founded. Facebook was a social phenomenon in two years. In 2016, Douyin (TikTok) was developed as an app in a little over 200 days. Within a year it had 100 million users, and became the world’s most downloaded app, today with 1.5 billion users, soon after its merger with Musical.ly. ChatGPT needed just two months to pick up 100 million monthly active users, and put companies around the world on notice about the importance ofAI strategy.

What’s going on? Change and disruption were always a feature of free markets. Now, however, we’re seeing it happen in the tech industry, with tech doing what tech does. Tech automates, accelerates, and extends itself anywhere it can, with consequences for everyone else. Today’s big acceleration is from cheap and standardized computers, open source software, cloud infrastructure, frictionless apps, all adopted at a mass level by businesses and consumers. These are the most widespread technologies ever. The next big thing is AI, and it will accelerate the pace even more broadly.

When once-in-a-decade upheavals happen every year, it’s time to rethink traditional ideas around starting a company, building a product, and running an enterprise. For starters, the search for the right fit between a new product and the market need is changing. All that time spent on prototyping and reviewing, before releasing something that will be the basis for permanent corporate happiness, is under pressure because of the nature and pace of change.

I believe it began when digital products were launched and then fine-tuned. Then, connected devices like electric cars got over the air upgrades that affected the behavior of both software and hardware. Now these two-way connections are everywhere, gathering information and changing how things work. This means that for products, the presence of a signal is critical to the design and life of a product. Just as time-to-scale has sped up products and companies, so has time-to-decay. The process of reading behavior, reviewing performance, and adjusting course is constant.

Graham and I may disagree about professional managers. It’s clear, though, that conventional management practices of creating inflexible strategies, building detailed processes, and delegating tasks down an hardened management chain will not survive the cycle time of products, or the rate of market changes.

Build a culture that’s urgent, and healthy

This means that the speedup of the feedback loop from fixed to dynamic extends throughout the organization. Its mission is supported by continuous two-way information flows. The so-called S-curve for companies is so short and fast that, as soon as the current product starts to scale, the next product planning needs to begin. The “zero to one” process of product/market fit, discovery and rediscovery, is now a daily task.

Every manager has to live at the edge of innovation to keep the company ahead of the market transitions. No one can safely assume there is a “peace mode” while the business is scaling on the back of very successful current products. Leadership is not exempt from the phenomenon of constant information flows. They need to have ears to the ground, and must be prepared to make radical decisions when called for. They can’t be scared of novelty. In fact, they should thrive on it, and always find innovative ways to succeed regardless of circumstance.

The mission of my company, Rubrik, is not just cybersecurity, in a traditional sense, but continuous uptime in the face of digital threats. We may not have been the first to see the need to be always on, but we were the first to see how much it changed even something as fundamental as cybersecurity.

Following the change to the product, and the change to an industry like cybersecurity, the new urgency affects how a company is organized for continual operations. At Rubrik, we call the way we organize our culture system “RIVET,” which stands for Relentlessness, Integrity, Velocity, Excellence, and Transparency.

Much like the world we’re working in, the stress is on sustaining a high level of quality information, sharing it, and acting on it, depending on the short-, medium-, and long-term needs of the organization. While the founder’s mode can be somewhat autocratic and filled with the whims of one person, this culture respects the inputs from many people, particularly if they can contextualize what they’re seeing and the actions they think we should take. Velocity and Integrity are values designed in part to prevent paralysis by meeting. We respect the urgency of the environment.

Rubrik isn’t alone in this cultural blend of corporate transparency and urgency. Amazon’s “Day 1 Culture,” though I haven’t experienced it, seems similar. Many top financial firms also have versions of radical candor that reflect their longtime high-velocity environments. I like Rubrik’s version best, though, because there is an acknowledgement of our shared humanity, and a belief in possibility. Urgency isn’t the enemy; it may in fact be an opportunity, depending on how it’s treated.

Achieving mode—not founder mode

In my founder’s letter for the Rubrik IPO, I called Maximal Thinking—”imagining a limitless future while accepting present constraints and contradictions.” The past, which takes you to the place of opportunity, is a kind of honorable burden—you don’t throw it off unnecessarily, but it doesn’t dictate where you need to go next. The future is limitless in part because there is so much information, and so many ways that change can be achieved. The present has paradoxes, because there are so many factors at play, but these need to be entertained, not worried over. It helps you to believe in yourself.

I think that balance of urgency and quiet fearlessness is why 87% of Rubrik’s employees say it’s a great place to work. We hire carefully, and we make sure that people are in an environment where they feel heard, they want to consume lots of information, and they want to make decisions for the collective good, which includes prioritizing customer needs in a high-velocity world.

Do the demands of the new high-velocity world, and how it should be managed, extend to the rest of your life? I hope not. Just because markets are fast, that doesn’t mean that the seasons of life have accelerated, too. Things like family and love can still grow slow. Commitment in all sorts of ways is a process that is fulfilled in the moment, but rendered meaningful over months and years.