The conventional advice given to scaling founders — "hire good people and give them room to do their jobs" — is actually instructions for how to run a company you didn't found. It's manager mode, and to founders it feels broken because it is.

"Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it's described that way, doesn't it? Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground."

Founders feel gaslit from both sides — by advisors telling them to run companies like managers, and by the C-level execs they hire who are some of the most skillful liars in the world (or more diplomatically, very skilled at managing up).

Founder mode breaks the principle that the CEO should only engage with the company via direct reports. Skip-level meetings become the norm rather than an exception unusual enough to need a name.

Steve Jobs ran an annual retreat for the 100 people he considered most important at Apple — not the 100 highest on the org chart. It's the kind of move that takes enormous force of will and can make a big company feel like a startup.

Used as an example of a founder-mode practice that's nearly unheard of elsewhere.

Usually when everyone around you disagrees with you, your default is to assume you're mistaken. Founders running their companies are one of the rare exceptions to that rule.

Prediction: once founder mode is established, people will misuse it. Founders unable to delegate will hide behind it, and non-founder managers will try to LARP as founders. The modular manager approach at least limits the damage a bad CEO can do.

Look at what founders have already achieved against a headwind of bad advice. Imagine what they'll do once we can tell them to run their companies like Steve Jobs instead of John Sculley.