Brian Chesky and Founder Mode

Brian Chesky, Co-Founder and CEO of Airbnb, has often championed the idea of “Founder Mode,” a concept popularized by Paul Graham.

I was immediately drawn to this concept when I first encountered it, but at the time, I interpreted it too narrowly. I thought it simply meant being hands-on rather than hands-off. That was a shallow view of a much deeper idea about leadership. This misunderstanding stemmed from Graham’s comparison of Founder Mode with “Manager Mode,” where leaders take a step back, focusing primarily on managing people rather than engaging directly with the work. The hands-on versus hands-off framing felt straightforward, especially since I’d seen similar principles in Elon Musk’s management philosophy. Musk requires engineering managers to spend at least 20% of their time doing actual engineering. My initial takeaway from this was that leaders need to stay close to the frontlines to understand what’s happening and avoid “leading without knowing.”

It wasn’t until I encountered leadership challenges in my own work that my understanding of Founder Mode deepened. Around this time, I came across an interview with Brian Chesky that reshaped my thinking. If you manage a team larger than ten people or one with multiple functional units, I highly recommend watching this interview in full, and don’t double-speed through it.

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Brian distilled Founder Mode into a single sentence: “Great leadership is presence, not absence.” At first, this might sound like the hands-on/hands-off distinction, but Brian’s reasoning went deeper than simply understanding the frontlines.

He explained this with the analogy of rowing a boat as a team. The goal, rowing forward, sounds simple enough. But in practice, merely stating this goal doesn’t suffice. That’s why, in rowing, there’s often someone at the front of the boat giving real-time guidance. If leaders provide a grand vision and then hand off autonomy to their teams, it can lead to chaos, contrary to what many business schools teach: “Hire great people and let them make the decisions.” Brian shared that at Airbnb, when different teams worked on the same overarching goal but had too much autonomy, they often ended up with different tech stacks, product designs, and processes that didn’t integrate. They were effectively operating as separate organizations. I’ve faced this exact issue myself.

Returning to the rowing analogy, even if everyone is aligned on rowing “north,” some might row 15% northeast at two strokes per second, while others row 10% northwest at three strokes per second. Everyone is working hard and toward the same goal, but the boat’s forward momentum is inefficient. From a physics perspective, the net force driving the boat forward is diluted.

This is where Founder Mode comes in. Brian pointed to Steve Jobs as a prime example. Jobs didn’t simply delegate problems and trust his teams to solve them independently. Instead, he immersed himself in the details of the most important projects and worked on them alongside his teams. Leaders in Founder Mode don’t act as decision-makers for every issue; they partner with their teams, ensuring alignment with the organization’s strategy. This involves providing a clear vision, adding context, and helping to unify efforts across teams. This echoes with my previous article Don’t Put the Founder on a Pedestal—Or Anyone Else that leaders need to figure out their position and in what way they can best contribute to the team. You should see yourself as one of the collaborators, not a dictator.

The secret to avoiding micromanagement lies in how leaders participate. Jobs talked about this at the D8 conference in 2010. He described Apple as organized like a startup, “the biggest startup on the planet,” and said teamwork depends on “trusting the other folks to come through with their part without watching them all the time.”

So the role of a leader in Founder Mode is to make sure everyone rows in the same direction with maximum force. You do that by being present and keeping everyone aligned with the larger vision, and you let them decide how to hold the paddle.