What to do when you’re foundering in jargon

SOMEDAY, when you find yourself in a windowless room being exhorted to go “founder mode” by an earnest motivational coach-type, it is Paul Graham whom you’ll want to thank.

The entrepreneur’s manifesto, which made the rounds in Silicon Valley earlier this month, declared that there are essentially two ways to run a company: “founder mode” or “manager mode”.

The conventional “manager mode” entails MBA basics such as hiring good people and giving them leeway to do their job. Graham, however, reckons that this is middle-man hooey – just another way to “hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground”.

A startup looking to scale, instead, might be better suited to “founder mode”. Graham’s memo was a little light on the details, but “founder mode” is presumably everything “manager mode” isn’t.

Going “founder mode” would mean getting deep into the weeds of the business, meeting key personnel without middle managers present, and being involved to a degree that might look awfully like micromanaging.

In the wake of Graham’s post, a million “thought leadership” response pieces were launched in the narcissist’s oasis that is LinkedIn. Everyone with a keyboard and an Aeron chair, it appeared, either rushed to define “founder mode” or debunk it.

You might think that you, on your relatively low-tech small-business archipelago, would be sheltered from such founder-manager navel-gazing – but you would be wrong.

What starts in tech tends to spread to the rest of the business world, feasibility be damned, so this piece of management flotsam is bound to wash up on your shores whether you like it or not.

What to do, then, in the face of this season’s management jargon being rammed down your gullet? Why, produce counter-jargon of your own.

Behold, I give you “intellectual promiscuity” – a five-dollar phrase for the two-buck idea that an idea ought to work for you until it doesn’t, and can be replaced or supplemented with a multitude of other ideas.

Pick and choose

The venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya referenced this concept on a podcast when discussing the “founder mode” memo. “The people that win are deeply intellectually promiscuous. They’re learning about many, many things,” he said.

“They’re adapting things to their own playbook. The next day they may throw that piece away and take something else, because this is something they learned.”

That attitude is the diametrical opposite of the old chestnut: “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.” The latter statement produces the sort of dogma that leads to stark dichotomies such as founder versus management mode. Long after “founder mode” ceases to be in vogue, the corporate world will continue rotating through innumerable kinds of absolutisms.

The best way to stay atop this whirligig of received wisdom is to be at liberty to pick and discard. In business as in life, information is often incomplete and things only clarify themselves the further along you get.

Beliefs that were true at the start of 2022 – “Robots can never make art!” – were false by year-end once OpenAI chief executive officer Sam Altman, for instance, was done with them. Fat was once the dieter’s kryptonite, now sugar is.

Being idea-agnostic is a more unsettling way to exist, of course. But think of all the time you’ll save writing fewer think pieces on LinkedIn.