3 Reasons the Concept of Founder Mode Resonates with Me as a Marketer
Paul Graham’s essay on “founder mode” has been highly controversial. Basically, founders love it and everybody else fears it will convince founders to micromanage the people they hire.
I get the objections to founder mode, but the idea really resonated with me as a marketer — despite the fact that, as a consultant who often has to convince founders to do things, I, too, could be the victim of micromanagement by a CEO who thinks he’s going into founder mode.
Here are three of my beliefs about marketing that are consistent with the concept of founder mode. My hope is that founders and executives who read this will better appreciate both the role they can play in marketing and the role they should expect marketers to play. Let’s figure out why founder mode resonated with a lot of people and try to take what we need and excise the rest.
Founders Can and Should Make an Outsize Impact on Marketing
Founders should be directly involved in marketing. This doesn’t mean they need to formally own marketing forever or run the weekly marketing team call. What it means is that, as long as they remain CEOs / execs, they will be seen as spokespeople for the company, and they should use that attention and trust on the part of the market to evangelize the organization.
The fact is that, generally speaking, way fewer people want to know what your director of marketing or VP of sales thinks. They want to hear from the founder and/or CEO, and they will use what that person says as the true indicator of what the company thinks, what it stands for, and how it’s positioned. So, founders, especially founder/CEOs, cannot afford to give up that trust, which, when leveraged thoughtfully, is an advantage. They can’t remain silent in-market or completely outsource the evangelism function.
The founder is the most natural chief evangelist, and instead of outsourcing that evangelism to others, they should find marketers who can help them fully capitalize on the opportunity. For example, hire someone who can help you hone the message and product content to reinforce it. But don’t entirely outsource ownership of the message and completely excuse yourself from the responsibility of disseminating it.
The Best Marketers Have Some Founder Mode in Them
Candidly, I think a lot of founders and/or CEOs in tech do not hold marketing in high esteem as a function. This is probably why many marketers are allergic to the idea of founder mode — they have PTSD from the founders and CEOs who don’t respect marketing and therefore micromanage or disregard them. But actually, marketing inefficacy is a self-reinforcing cycle (this is something my collaborator Paul Knegten often says). The CEO doesn’t believe marketers will be super competent, impactful people. So, they hire incompetent people. And the wheel of marketing disappointments keeps spinning.
The best marketers have some founder qualities in them — and if founders recognize this, they’ll hire stronger marketers, and those people will bring out the best in the founders and vice versa. For example:
Great marketers have a bias for action. They understand their job is to build the company’s reputation and relationships, and you can’t do that if you’re not getting in front of your customers. So, they just do more stuff than mediocre marketers. They are highly productive.
Great marketers are strategic thinkers. This doesn’t mean they love to write strategy docs or briefs — it’s probably the opposite. It means they can boil down strategy to simple terms and explain it on the fly — then, they quickly get to action. For example, I frequently say marketing strategy boils down to three simple things: What’s the business problem marketing can help with? What’s the message (which has to differentiate us and galvanize customers)? Where will we distribute the message to build our reputation and relationships? Marketers should be able to explain to you what strategy means and then implement it.
Great marketers can give you the elevator pitch for a company on the spot. By this, I mean they understand the message: what the company does and for whom, what differentiates the company from its competitors, and why customers and those who influence them should care.
These are all traits of great founders: a bias for action, an ability to think and act strategically, and an obsession with the company story / an ability to evangelize it. The best marketers exhibit these traits, too. (And, by the way, very few marketers do. Most marketers would balk if you put them to any of these tests.)
At Its Best, Founder Mode Means Collaboration, Not Micromanagement
Founder mode doesn’t necessarily mean the founder does every single thing and doesn’t trust anyone else. It means the founder takes an active role in a function and works with the people driving it to make it successful. When it comes to marketing, this would, at its best, be a recipe for success, not dysfunction.
Another candid take for you: I often see marketing teams that have a knowledgeable founder with strong perspectives on the industry at their disposal, and their main concern is preventing the founder from doing damage when they should mainly be concerned about how to leverage the founder’s audience, voice, and expertise to do the core job of marketing: building the company’s reputation and relationships.
The founder has an unusual amount of power to realize — what should be — the goals of marketing. If they have strong points of view on the industry, even better! They should be even more equipped than the average founder or CEO to command attention, differentiate the company from rivals, and build its reputation. Marketers should come from a place of opportunity when they deal with these types of founders. They should view it as an advantage and seek to leverage it while advising the founder to rein things in where needed — instead of departing from the position that the founder should mostly be kept silent to avoid an unlikely worst-case scenario.
Who’s Afraid of Founder Mode?
Well, marketers, apparently. They want to be left alone to exercise their function-specific expertise, and they don’t want to be micromanaged. Totally understandable. I’ve experienced micromanaging founders, too. For example, I like to think I’m pretty good at writing. When founders rewrite every word of an article I craft for the company, I do tend to wonder whether it’s the best use of their time. In that case, maybe I’ve done a poor job. Or maybe they’re micromanaging.
That said, the concept of “founder mode” has a lot of value to offer marketing — in terms of how founders should market the company, how founders and marketers should collaborate, and which qualities of founders marketers should emulate.
On my and Eric Franchi’s podcast this week with Michael Katz, we discussed founder mode, and Michael, while adding a lot of nuance to Graham’s essay, made the point that founders can only be reined in so much. Amen to that, I say. Let the dogs out.
