Picture your favourite action hero: resourceful, scrappy, always tinkering with gadgets in the nick of time. That’s the quintessential entrepreneur in “Founder Mode”. Now, swap in the polished office exec, presenting slides with perfect bullet points - enter the corporate boss in “Manager Mode”. Both are crucial in their own settings, but mixing them up in a high-growth startup can be like asking your house cat to catch a Frisbee.
According to Paul Graham of Y Combinator, Founder Mode calls for an intense, almost obsessive focus on building and iterating. Founders need to operate in a perpetual state of urgency, wearing multiple hats (or even all the hats if they have to). They thrive on incomplete information, tight deadlines, and big leaps of faith - like jumping out of a plane and assembling the parachute on the way down. Brian Chesky at Airbnb has famously emphasised laser-like devotion to product experience and user satisfaction, which propelled Airbnb from a wacky airbed idea to a global phenomenon.
By contrast, Manager Mode demands a systematic approach that relies on structure, process, and delegation. This style works wonders in a more established environment: think big corporations with hierarchies, detailed processes, and an HR policy for everything including “who ate my yogurt in the fridge”. Managers excel at ensuring stability and efficiency, implementing metrics, and optimising for incremental improvements - crucial traits once a company matures past its hectic toddler years.
However, in a high-growth startup, overemphasis on Manager Mode can be dangerous. In early to mid-stage ventures, speed trumps structure. If managers are too focused on tight protocols, they risk slowing down innovation, frustrating agile teams, and ultimately losing ground to nimbler competitors. Let’s not forget the wise words from LettsGroup : in a scale-up context, you need a founder’s grit and creative chaos to maintain momentum. Corporate managers can inadvertently crush that spirit by demanding evidence and processes for every tiny move - at a time when rapid experimentation and pivoting on the fly are the startup’s lifeblood.
Let's face it: putting a traditional corporate manager in charge of a high-growth startup is like asking a librarian to DJ at a rave. Both are professionals, but one of them is about to have a very, very bad time. The fundamental divide between "Founder Mode" and "Manager Mode" isn't just about different approaches to business - it's about different species of leaders altogether.
Imagine being someone crazy enough to bet their future on an idea that most people think is stupid, while simultaneously being sane enough to actually execute it. That's your founder in their natural habitat. And these beautiful weirdos share some distinct traits:
Delicious Delusion: They possess a level of conviction that would make a cult leader blush. We're talking about people who see empty apartments and imagine Airbnb, or look at a bookstore and envision Amazon. As Brian Chesky demonstrated, sometimes you need to be just delusional enough to imagine a world where sleeping in strangers' homes becomes normal.
Learning at Warp Speed: LettsGroup's research shows that founders are essentially human sponges on steroids. While corporate managers are perfecting their PowerPoint skills, founders are learning everything from coding to cap tables to customer psychology - usually all before breakfast.
Resource Wizardry: These folks could sell sand in the Sahara. They don't just manage resources; they conjure them out of thin air through sheer force of will and the occasional blood sacrifice to the venture capital gods.
Uncertainty Addiction: Where others see terrifying ambiguity, founders see a playground. They're comfortable making massive decisions with about 1% of the information any sane person would want, and somehow, they sleep just fine at night.
On the other side of the business universe, we have our corporate managers. Bless their process-loving hearts, they also have a number of common traits:
Resource Hoarding: These folks have their grip on a budget like it's the last crumb on Earth. They excel at optimising what exists, which is great until you need them to create something from nothing.
Risk Allergies: If uncertainty were peanuts, these would be the folks carrying an EpiPen. They've been trained to spot and eliminate risk like it's a game of corporate whack-a-mole.
Process Worship: They've never met a workflow they couldn't flowchart or a meeting they couldn't schedule another meeting about. Their natural habitat is a room full of Gantt charts and KPI dashboards.
Hierarchy Heroes: They navigate corporate politics with the skill of a Renaissance diplomat, though they might break out in hives if asked to operate without a clear reporting structure.
That’s not to say Manager Mode doesn’t have its place; it absolutely does - once a scale-up hits a more stable, mature phase. After all, no founder wants to be the reason the company has zero processes and the accounting books look like a teenager’s messy bedroom. But until then, strong entrepreneurial leaders should remain in Founder Mode, keeping the original spark alive. Their traits - fierce passion, relentless drive, and a willingness to fail fast - are the key to continuing that rocket ride.
With the growing debate about Founder Mode versus Manager Mode, LettsGroup, who use their AI VentureFactory to help founders scale systemically, has researched the key traits required of an entrepreneur to stand a chance of being successful at Founder Mode. They have also looked at the traits required to be a successful corporate manager and how these two seemingly 'opposing' skill sets can interconnect - or not...
Innovation Suffocation: Nothing kills the startup spirit quite like a manager insisting on a 12-step approval process for testing new ideas. While founders are playing jazz, managers are trying to write a symphony for an orchestra that doesn't exist yet. Plus, corporate managers are taught to be risk averse and cautious, not quite the vibe of your average startup team.
Premature Process-ification: Corporate managers love building infrastructure like teenagers love TikTok, or did... They'll create departments, hierarchies, and processes for a company of five people, essentially building a corporate cage before the startup butterfly has even emerged from its chrysalis.
Cultural Catastrophe: Watch in horror as the "move fast and break things" ethos transforms into "move cautiously and file a report about it". The high-ownership startup culture crashes headfirst into permission-based paralysis.
Timing Tragedy: By the time a corporate manager has finished their risk assessment spreadsheet, three competitors have launched, iterated, and pivoted twice. As Chesky would tell you, Airbnb would still be selling election-themed cereal if they'd waited for perfect market analysis.
The brutal truth? Neither mode is inherently superior - they're just catastrophically wrong when misapplied. Manager Mode is like a fine wine: perfect for mature companies but wasted on a startup that needs the entrepreneurial equivalent of Red Bull. Meanwhile, Founder Mode in a large corporation can be like letting a bull loose in a china shop - exciting briefly, but ultimately expensive. Beware DOGE...
In the early stages, your startup needs a chaos pilot, not a process prophet. Save the corporate managers for when you're big enough to need someone to optimise your ping-pong ball budget and design your company cafeteria's tasting menu. So, next time you’re considering who to put in charge of your early-stage or rapidly scaling startup, ask: do you need an inventor or a caretaker? Either way, remember you can’t cat-proof a Frisbee, and you can’t always plan a revolution with a spreadsheet. Sometimes you’ve just got to build, iterate, and hang on for dear life.
This article first appeared at The Letts Journal.
