Founder Mode: Why the Best Advice Is Often Wrong

Last week, I traveled to Dallas and Silicon Valley to meet my team, potential customers, and investors. It was energizing to connect with my driven engineers, heads down to disrupt healthcare payment integrity with our Neuro Symbolic AI platform.

The Conventional Wisdom that kills startups

During one meeting, a VC partner advised me to "hire good people and get out of their way" to scale Nedl Labs. While that advice sounds ideal, it's a staple of business books and something successful CEOs often claim to follow; I find it overly simplistic and completely misleading.

Paul Graham's recent essay challenges standard company-scaling advice: hire skilled executives, give them autonomy, and sit back and relax 😊 However, this often results in mediocrity, as experienced managers excel at appearances and managing up but not at outcomes.

Inspired by Brian Chesky's Y Combinator talk, Graham notes that Chesky's initial adoption of "manager mode" almost ruined Airbnb. Learning from successful founder-operators, Chesky developed a different approach: "founder mode."

Founder mode is what every startup founder does when they go from 0 to 1.

What Founder Mode Actually Means

Founder mode is not about being a control freak or micro manager, which is toxic; instead, it is more nuanced and more powerful.

Founder mode means engaging with your company beyond just your direct reports. It means skip-level meetings become normal, not taboo. It means you don't treat parts of your organization as black boxes you're not allowed to open.

It means you stay close to the work that matters. It is a trait of how we operate when we build something from nothing:

High agency. Don't wait for someone else to fix problems. Own them.

Extreme focus. Know what moves the needle, and be ruthless about saying no to everything else.

Speed over perfection. Ship, Learn, Iterate. Don't polish until it's pretty; Validate until it is right.

Customer obsession. Do not run the company from a spreadsheet. Build it from conversations, feedback, and real-world use cases.

Show up & hustle. Do not delegate the hard problems and watch from the sidelines.

Founder Mode has re-entered the zeitgeist for a reason: it counters drift, keeps leaders close to users, and raises the bar on product quality and pace.

Data Doesn't Lie

Fortune found that the 22 Fortune 500 companies still led by their founders produced cumulative returns 20 times higher than other Fortune 500 firms. This suggests founder involvement drives exceptional results, as these leaders focus on a transformative purpose that shapes their decisions and company culture.

Why This Matters for Us

I want each of us at Nedl Labs to imbibe founder mode, dig into project details, ask in-depth questions, pivot directions based on customer input, and bring their founder mindset to work. I believe strongly in our potential, and I am committed to never settling.

Nedl Labs was founded to tackle challenging problems, not by playing it safe. We focus on ensuring healthcare spending goes toward care instead of waste by developing advanced neuro-symbolic AI, an ambitious challenge amid the current buzz around agentic AI.

Founder mode is less about a job title and more about mindset. It will set us apart from other startups that survive early chaos from those that stall out.

Being in founder mode means recognizing we don't have all the solutions, and that's what creates psychological safety when we admit it and seek guidance.

When I say, "I don't know, let's figure this out together," it is not about weakness; it's a sign that genuine innovation starts with being open enough to learn anew.

The Hard Truth About Delegation

The best companies aren't built by simply hiring talented people and stepping back; they're built by leaders who ensure their teams understand and apply first principles, instincts, and values.

The key difference is in delegation: poor delegation leaves people guessing, while effective delegation sets clear priorities and parameters, then collaborates to improve results.

Great delegation means sharing what matters, staying involved where needed, and enabling others; it is not about letting go, but multiplying impact.

Paul Graham draws that line clearly. If involvement raises the product's slope and the team's bar, it's leadership. If it lowers them, it's interference.

What Founder Mode Means Going Forward

We are continuing to figure out what founder mode should look like at scale. Each organization will execute this differently, depending on its unique requirements, team strengths, and growth stage.

Remain engaged in critical details. Participating in customer conversations, meeting users where they are, delivering value efficiently and quickly --- ship fast, reviewing work and outcomes, learning from failures, and persistently seeking honest answers by asking "why."

Foster a bias toward action. Prioritize shipping continuously, rapid learning, and iterative improvement ahead of competitors. Our competitors have bigger teams and bigger budgets. We have speed. Decide quickly and test it while they are still coordinating calendars. Speed is our weapon, not in managing up.

Recruit for shared values. If you want to execute orders, we are not it. If you want to be challenged, empowered, and occasionally uncomfortable as we build something exceptional, welcome. Don't hire executors. Hire builders striving for innovation.

Be Scrappy. More resources don't mean more bureaucracy. No approval layers. No CYA emails. No playing it safe. The moment we act like a big company is the moment we lose. Our competitors are drowning in process. We stay hungry.

Founder mode isn't about control. It's about refusing to let our standards slip as we scale.

The Bottom Line

Traditional business advice tells you that staying in founder mode means you're not mature enough to lead a real company. That you need to "grow up" and learn to manage like a professional. I'm calling bullshit on that advice.