Find your own mode

Don't blindly follow other people's advice!

In this edition

• What I’ve been up to

• Find your own mode [expanded from LinkedIn post]

• Stuff you might like

What I’ve been up to

It’s been a busy 2 months since my last newsletter, hence the hiatus. During that time, I did a 2.5-week trip to the UK and Germany, filled with live music (Adele and lots of indie at a London festival) and nature (Lake District). I’ve also been quite busy helping different founders on a bunch of different things — while the market is still tough, it does seem at least to have stabilised and to be not getting worse.

A few photos from my trip:

We walked with wolves and saw foxes and badgers in the Lake District! Wolves are like much bigger, stronger and more dangerous versions of huskies. The foxes were quite small and very highly food-motivated, while zooming all over the place. Meanwhile, we booked a badger hide that gave us an incredible view of badgers foraging in the evening!

While in London, we stumbled across the poet with a typewriter on the Thames South Bank in London, who conjured up this cute poem in response to the prompt “badgers and cats”. We also played bingo.

We capped the trip with Adele’s second last show in Munich. My musical tastes usually run a bit more indie, but this was an incredible show before 80,000 fans. She’s an amazing singer, but it was her audience engagement that really elevated the experience. Very glad we caught her!

Find your own mode

[expanded from LinkedIn post]

I spent 10 years at Airbnb, so inevitably I got some questions about “Founder Mode” over the past couple of weeks. 🤔

TLDR: you’ve got to find your own mode. 💪 At scale, the optimal answer will include elements of both Founder Mode and Manager Mode, and will change over time. While at early-stage, you are most definitely in 100% Founder Mode 100% of the time…

I believe “Founder Mode vs Manager Mode” creates an overly-reductive false dichotomy.

Instead, here’s what I think:

• There are positive behaviours ✅ and negative behaviours ❌

• Some behaviours can be positive in one context but negative in another ⚖️

• Everyone is pre-disposed towards certain behaviours, but that doesn’t mean they can’t learn to start or stop behaviours 🔄

• Some behaviours are just harder to pull off. Some things associated with Founder Mode, like turnarounds and drastic strategy shifts, may be more difficult (but not impossible) for non-founders 🧗‍♂️

So even if you buy into the “Founder Mode vs Manager Mode” dichotomy, the reality is that each mode represents a spectrum of behaviours that can be positive or negative, depending on the leader in question and the context and needs of the business/company.

The best leaders are those that strongly embody positive founder and manager behaviours. 🔥 Think of it as a 2x2:

I do think though, that there are some things that CEOs and leaders are always responsible for and need to do well — if these aren’t done well, it doesn’t really matter what mode they claim to be operating in:

• Articulating an inspiring vision/mission. A powerful vision or mission will inspire the team and help with recruiting. I definitely believe that missionaries will usually beat mercenaries, and people will self-select for whether they want to be part of that.

• Setting a clear and coherent strategy. A goal is not a strategy, and neither is a plan or roadmap. A good strategy will say what to do and what not to do, and enable teams to usually make trade-offs without needing to escalate.

• Ensuring healthy team dynamics. The leader has to ensure that their immediate team (for the CEO, this will be the executive team) is healthy and operating well. This requires intentional work and investment, and does not happen by accident. It may require ensuring that the right people are in the right seats on the bus.

• Building and maintaining a strong culture. Beyond the immediate team, the leader is accountable for the culture in the broader organization. I used to say that maintaining culture is everyone’s shared responsibility, but the leader needs to intentionally design what the culture should look like, and act to ensure that it comes to fruition.

• Inspect the details (that you care about or think are important). Delegation does not mean abdication. The leader should be free to inspect and go deep on the things they care about or think are important, even if someone has been empowered to lead that area. After all, someone else may be responsible for delivering the work, but the leader remains accountable for the results.

Ultimately, each leader needs to find the right combination that works for them and their specific context. You will have your own right answer, and it will change over time.

And by all means listen to advice, but don’t follow blindly, whether it’s from a VC, Paul Graham, or an angel investor. Instead, pick and choose what makes sense to you given your unique circumstances, and be ready to adapt depending on things go. 💡

Stuff you might like

• This was definitely an unexpected use of AI: using AI and computer vision to make $138,000 from shredded banknote pieces. It wasn’t successful, but it does show (once again) that AI use cases are really limited by human imagination and ingenuity.

• Prof Aswath Damodaran (the Dean of Valuation) discussed Nvidia earnings, and clearly and powerfully explains the difference between trading and investing.

• Cobot is a startup working on humanoid robots, founded by ex-Amazon engineers. They shared the memo they used to (successfully) pitch Jeff Bezos for their Series B, not so much as an example of a successful fundraising pitch in a memo form, but as a rare publicly-available example of a good Amazon-style narrative.

• This NYT story (paywall unlocked) basically shows that if you’re not already using AI for everything you do (that you can use AI for), you should start doing so — because your competitors are probably already doing that.