Should founders stay in the details, or hire great people and get out of the way?
Experts
Leaders must be in the details. Micromanagement gets a bad rap — the best founders stay hands-on.
Your job is to hire A-players and get out of their way. Delegation is the only way to scale.
How we restructured Airtable's entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO)
Yeah, and I think anything taken to an extreme can be problematic. There is a world where you are so in the details and in every detail that you're basically just micromanaging and you're kind of creating like a euphemism for that. That's not really what founder mode is about.
It's those little decisions and really be able to be at the bleeding edge of what's possible both in the browser and with the real-time data architecture. That made the product what it was. I think the same is true for Figma, which actually had a very parallel timeline to us.
How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack)
I think when you're running a marketplace, you tend to sit in your ivory tower a little bit, looking at stats and thinking like, "If only we could get people to do X, it'd be better for everyone." I certainly did that in my career.
So, lots of coaching tools that Lyft, Uber did it, like most marketplaces provide some sort of coaching. You have a review system perhaps, you have stars for your sellers, for sellers who fall below the threshold then coach them, provide them the right tools, the right guidance, what is the standard that you have on your marketplace and help them m...
Brian Chesky’s new playbook
I basically got involved in every single detail. And I basically told leaders that leaders are in the details. And there's this negative term called micromanagement, and I think there's a difference between micromanagement, which is telling people exactly what to do and being in the details.
First of all, I want to give you a very surprising learning. I weirdly now, the more I get involved ... This is so weird. The more in the details I am, the more time I have on my hands. That's a paradox. And I want to explain that paradox. It doesn't make any sense.
How Revolut trains world-class PMs: The “Local CEO” model, raw intellect & building wow products
And the third type becomes increasingly more important. So the first type is UX product owners. Then there are technical product owners, and then there are data science product owners. So UX product owners are the ones who work on consumer facing part of the product.
Two things that you need to understand about how Revolut operates is that we operate in small lean teams that are tasked to build products and as I mentioned, and having end-to-end responsibility for products. And usually they're the ones who build it from zero and then they're growing and developing this product.
Behind the founder | Drew Houston (Dropbox)
And I felt like I had done that. That's a big part of the problem that led to a lot of this chaos at the end of chapter two, where I was like, oh, man, I'm on this treadmill. I'm doing stuff, but I'm clearly not setting the right direction. Or people are confused or it's not working, and I was too distant from the product.
You don't have the same kind of confusion or learning curve problem. And then if you start out being too far leaned in, then you lean out too far. And I think a lot of that founder mode flip is when you're like, hey, this is not the company I want to be running. I need to be more involved. I need to stop making excuses.
How a great founder becomes a great CEO | Jonathan Lowenhar (co-founder of Enjoy The Work)
Founder mode gets me angry. That article just got me hot. It really felt like an excuse. We were giving founders a permission to not learn the job. It's not manager mode is bad, it's the greatest CEOs know when to calibrate which one is needed.
Yes. Founder mode gets me angry. That article just got me hot.
The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (“The Manager’s Path”)
So I know you've written a lot about engineering leadership, you spent a lot of times with engineering leaders, so I have a few questions here. One is that I know that one of the things that haunts engineering leaders most is finding the balance between staying technical and their technical expertise, and their leadership expertise and basically fi...
Yeah, so one piece of advice I give everybody is don't stop being a hands-on technical until you feel like it's in your bones. You feel like you've got mastery that you could ... if you know a second language fluently or if you played an instrument really, really seriously for a long time or maybe a sport really, really seriously for a long time, y...
How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise)
My analogy for this is, going back to this teammate analogy, it's like if you hired a teammate, but you're never allowed to get on a call with them and you can only go back and forth asynchronously over time. That works for some teammates and eventually that's actually how you want to spend most of your time.
I think, to give an example right now, nowadays when you work with a coding agent, it writes a ton of code, but it turns out writing code is actually one of the most fun parts of software engineering for many software engineers. So then you end up reviewing AI code. And that's often a less fun part of the job for many software engineers.
I’ve run 75+ businesses. Here’s why you’re probably chasing the wrong idea. | Andrew Wilkinson
Previously I was very, very skeptical of ADHD, but it is a real brain disorder if you actually dig into it. It's a very real thing, very objective that people have poor executive function. And for me, it's given me a lot more empathy for myself and my behaviors because at work, if you have ADHD, you can delegate to other people and build systems to...
The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code. | Dan Shipper (Every)
You can give it something to do and it will go off and it'll run for 20 or 30 minutes and complete a task autonomously, agentically. Especially with Claude Opus 4 that just came out, it's this gigantic leap forward in AI's ability to work by itself.
And I'm just like, "Yeah, that's exactly what Every first-time manager says." You always have this problem, where you're like, "Okay. Well, if I delegate it, it's not done in the way that I want it to be done. If I do it myself, I get no leverage.
Inside ChatGPT: The fastest growing product in history | Nick Turley (OpenAI)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. There's some smiling going on that's just on the team and I feel like have technology, some of it is not the product. I think people are actually just getting used to this technology in a really interesting way, where I find, and this is why the product needs to evolve too, that this idea of delegating to an AI, it's not natural t...
One of them is that amazing ideas come from anywhere. The thing about running a research lab is you really don't tell people what to research. That's not what you do. And we inherited that culture even as we become a research and product company.
Inside Devin: The AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code this year | Scott Wu
Absolutely. And so Devin is a fully autonomous software engineer that is going to work on tasks end to end, and so there are a lot of great tools for all parts of the stack of the AI code workflow. What Devin does is it is a full asynchronous workflow, and so you can tag Devin on an issue in Slack, you're talking about an issue and you tag Devin, y...
But I think that the big shift that we really felt we would see is moving from kind of this text to text model to an actual autonomous system that can make decisions, that can interact with the real world, that can take in feedback, that can iterate and take multiple steps to solve problems.
Hard-won lessons building 0 to 1 inside Atlassian | Tanguy Crusson (Head of Jira Product Discovery)
So there's a lot of empowerment that comes from that, but also it's a mix of top-down, bottom-up happiness I'd say. And so it can feel really chaotic at first, but once you know how to navigate it, it's actually pretty easy to try to go after something that you care about. And of course, we're a big company, so there's lots of ways we can get help.
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Thinking like a gardener, slime mold, the adjacent possible: Product advice from Alex Komoroske
People use these things a lot as oracles. "I'm going to have it. I'm going to formulate the answer and it's going to be a fully fledged answer." And of course, strawberry has been really stabbed at. Gotten a chance to play with it. They are getting better at some of these kinds of behaviors at great expense.
We've forgotten a world without aggregators. Non-aggregator ecosystems make it so participants don't have to fear empowering their overlord, where that you have to worry about each bit of action you're doing, the aggregator is getting it more and more powerful. MySpace was the Wild West.
Behind the product: Replit | Amjad Masad (co-founder and CEO)
And that's super empowering for them. We saw it also with marketing departments like SpotHero has a head of marketing that actually can code decently well but use Replit to build these apps, and they built a competitive analysis application that looks at a competitor's pricing and makes sure that they're benchmarked correctly.
If we give it enough tools, let's say, I can drop it in Slack and instead of interfacing with it in this fashion, I want to interface with it in a totally autonomous way. So we actually have this feature coming up where instead of me testing it, we give it another agent.
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2 comments · Share your perspective
Watched our founder try to stay in every detail at 200 people. It nearly killed the company. Delegation isn't giving up control — it's multiplying it.
Brian Chesky's return to founder mode at Airbnb is the best case study. Sometimes you NEED the founder back in the details.