Founder mode is no excuse for poor management

Way too many founders apologize for how they want to run the company. They find some midpoint between how they want to run a company and how the people they lead want to run the company. That's a good way to make everyone miserable. Because what everyone really wants is clarity. And what everyone really wants is to be able to row in the same direction really quickly.

To be a founder is a state of being, it's an attitude. To be a CEO is a craft. The more founders who can accept that those are two separate things and they're both equally important to build an ascendant startup, the better all of us will be.

A lot of CEOs have done well because they follow the 'dharma' of the founders quite well. These are the principles that were given to me and I'm going to sustain this and make it even bigger.

Founder mode gets me angry. It really felt like an excuse. We were giving founders a permission to not learn the job.