I was in the room when Brian Chesky gave the now famous talk on lessons learned being a founder. Paul Graham later wrote up his notes from the talk and coined the term Founder Mode to describe Brian’s methods. There is even a Wikipedia page that gives the backstory of Graham’s definition. Brian’s talk was intended to be off the record, and I will respect that by not sharing any stories. I want to give my own perspective now that the hype has quieted down.
Part of why I think people enjoyed the talk so much is that Brian is very qualified to give it, and every point he made was underscored by very entertaining and visceral stories of his experience. That said, because of the stories and unstructured nature, I’m not convinced every person in the room heard the same message. My belief is that the talk was somewhat of a founder Rorschach test, validating many feelings while prescribing fairly straightforward ideas.
If I could give my own two word description of the talk, it would be a much less sexy sounding but also much more accurately prescriptive: Review and Recruit. Brian described how in studying the email archives of Steve Jobs for a month, he was able to piece together how Steve spent time, and then to learn lessons that he would later apply to great effect at Airbnb. The bottom line was that he felt founders at scale should focus on just two categories of work.
The first category was review. Brian encouraged bringing together both the top two management layers of the function being reviewed, as well as all the individuals involved in that particular product or project in review. He would then facilitate meetings in which he would drive the question asking and interact both with his direct reports and the individuals doing the work. He would often challenge them to perform near impossible feats of revision of the work, such as asking for revisions ‘Tomorrow’ on a Friday, and expect them to rise to the occasion.
Brian encouraged founders to spend their entire 9-5 work week in scheduled review meetings, reviewing primarily product but also other areas of the company, and to be discerning about the content of what comes up. He recommended managing through these meetings as a way of ensuring that everyone that touches the work of the company hears direct feedback from him. In this sense, he was imposing his taste as the founder onto every product, project and process in the company, and managing it directly - while scaling it through large groups.
The second category that Brian argued for was to spend the time at the margins in between review meetings recruiting. He had the recruitment team report directly to him, and focused both on the top two management layers of the company - all of whom reported to him - and key R&D positions in product. He said that the best people want to work directly for the founder, and so the only solution even when you’re at scale is to recruit them yourself. It sounds like Brian dedicates mealtimes, evenings, weekends and occasional weekdays entirely to recruiting, as the sole activity that he performs running Airbnb outside of review meetings.
No doubt there is other work at the margins, such as email (which I’ll get to). But the bottom line was that Brian felt the way founders should scale themselves is to manage the work directly through large format review meetings, and manage recruitment themselves. He believes, and the evidence from studying Steve Jobs and the many others who have since endorsed or themselves practice the method, that this is the best way to scale founder’s taste.
I did find when Convictional’s old business was peak scale that constant review was necessary to keep things aligned to our overall goals. I found though that I would burnout if I spent all my time in review meetings and interviewing people. I think I would argue that Brian’s prescription works particularly well for founders with strong verbal communication and who are extroverted. The question is when you communicate better in writing and are introverted, what then?
I believe the answer to that question originates with other great founders like Jensen Huang, Elon Musk and Mark Cuban. The answer is that in place of some of the calendar time being spent on product review meetings and recruitment, you become a master of email. Every great introvert founder seems to be a machine when it comes to managing their inbox. I think there are repeatable lessons that apply across both of Brian’s categories of review and recruit.
Jensen Huang has evolved a system of weekly updates from the NVIDIA team called T5T, where he expects everyone in the company to send him an email with five bullet points of updates. NVIDIA has tens of thousands of employees, and he still reads as many of these as he can. At every scale of company (that is successful…) where there is an introvert CEO, I have seen the same pattern repeat. I know of a company with 300 employees where the CEO spends 6 hours a week reading weekly updates in email. And I know of another one with 1400 employees where the CEO spends the bulk of Saturday and Sunday reading every update.
Where professional managers might focus on updates from the top layer of the company, the introvert founder mode equivalent is to continue to read as many team updates as you can at every level of the company regardless of company scale. This is how the best introvert founders perform the same version of goal alignment that Brian describes performing through review meetings. How much real time communication is required is more of a matter of personal preference of the founder CEO, more so than a specific prescription for every founder.
On the recruiting front, my belief is the best founders still do cold outreach to talented people themselves. I have seen this in action. Some of that time is going to be interviewing and talking to people live, and other parts of that time is going to be cold emailing them to talk to you. In practice, this is viewed by Brian and many others as the second most important task of a founder. Recruiting has to be an activity that the founder themselves prioritizes every day.
If you want to practice founder mode, avoid confusing memes of abusive treatment of staff with the real deal, which is an intense emphasis on review and recruiting. For extroverts, that might mean back to back meetings where you can give verbal feedback to groups responsible at every level for execution of your product and other efforts as well as recruitment. For introverts, it might mean balancing meetings like that with email driven goal alignment review and cold outbound emails to talented people. I think all the best founders come back to this sooner or later as their method for scaling themselves, and by extension their impact.