It is also true that when one of these innovative companies matures and faces challenges, the founder has the unique ability to make bold moves and stick to the original vision when others push for a less risky course. There are certainly times when companies have struggled when founders have been replaced by managers. Remember Yahoo? And of course, there’s Apple, where the founder returned and restored the company to its former glory and beyond.
But there are also plenty of counterexamples. Apple isn’t exactly fighting Tim Cook. And consider Microsoft. Its CEO since 2014. Satya Nadella was a lifer at the company, working in various divisions since 1992. this way. Not a founder, no. But he took the company to new heights. Although Bill Gates is still revered at Microsoft, no one at the company wants him back at the top.
And god knows, there are plenty of cases where it wasn’t management fakes, but tenacious founders that ran a company into the ground. My guess is that Travis Kalanick might have benefited from listening to exhausted managers. His replacement, a managerial type of dude, made Uber profitable.
The fact is, not everyone is Brian Chesky and no one is like Steve Jobs. The vast majority of companies never take off, but instead fade into infamy. Very few founders get to the point where investors require them to retain adult oversight to manage growth, because only the rarest of companies get to that point.
It’s fun to talk about founder mode, maybe for the same reason some of us read Ben Horowitz’s founder porn with our noses pressed to the window. Founder mode, which Graham says will one day get its close-up in management texts, really only applies to the most exceptional founders, the ones Steve Jobs once described as “the crazy ones.” Their companies are not called unicorns for nothing.
Time travel
In 2007 I seeded a batch of 12 companies in Y Combinator. (Starting next year, there will be four batches a year with hundreds of startups.) Even then, it was clear that Graham, who was extremely practical, had developed his views on founder supremacy. My story was published in Newsweek under the headline “Billionaire Boot Camp.”
Every Tuesday during the program, Y Combinator hosts a chili or stew dinner for the startups. At this first Graham and [cofounder Jessica] Livingstone distributes gray T-shirts emblazoned with one of Graham’s most telling admonitions, DO SOMETHING THE PEOPLE WANT. A second black shirt is only given to startups that achieve a “liquidation event” – a purchase by a larger company or an IPO. It reads, I DID SOMETHING PEOPLE WANTED.
