I Hate “Founder Mode”
I hate "Founder Mode."
It's ineffective. It has a high probability of failure. And, most importantly, it's just a polite Silicon Valley-coded way of saying:
"The founder stopped trusting their team, is spiraling, and now they're acting like a dick. But we're calling it visionary because we're too scared to say otherwise."
"Founder mode" isn’t noble. It's not heroic. It's not even a strategy. It's an ego flare-up with a C-suite title. It happens when growth slows. When the story gets fuzzy. When the founder realizes the company is no longer a perfect mirror of their identity.
And instead of working through that they blow shit up.
👉 They override product teams.
👉 They cancel roadmaps.
👉 They announce a new direction in an All Hands because they feel something.
Then the headlines roll in:
👉 "The founder is back in the product."
👉 "They’ve gone full founder mode."
👉 "The magic is returning."
Magic?
Bro, you just ghosted your CPO and wrote copy for a landing page. That's not what I'd call vision. That's a tantrum with a valuation.
Here's what nobody tells you: Most founder mode moments are emotional regressions dressed up as strategic clarity.
👉 It's a self-soothing mechanism.
👉 A way to feel in control again.
Because the company doesn’t feel like "yours" anymore and instead of evolving your leadership, you revert to the one phase where you felt powerful:
👉 Early-stage
👉 Hands-on
👉 Whiteboard-slinging
👉 Hero mode
But now there are 200 employees, actual customers, real systems. And your need to feel important just created 3 months of churn and a $400k engineering distraction.
And the worst part? The system rewards it.
👉 VCs swoon.
👉 Tech press claps.
👉 Employees hold their breath and whisper "I guess we're doing this now."
Why?
Because no one wants to be the one to say it out loud:
👉 "Founder mode" is often just ego with good PR.
👉 "Founder-led" sometimes just means "founder-unchecked."
👉 "Returning to the product" sometimes means "I can't lead, so I'm building."
The real work isn’t stepping back in.
👉 It's learning how to lead without being the center of the universe.
👉 It's knowing when your proximity is helping and when it's hurting.
Great founders evolve.
The ones stuck in founder mode? They don't scale. They spiral. And they call it genius.