Brian Chesky breaks down what people get wrong about ‘founder mode’

• “Founder mode” is not about “swagger,” says one of the founders who popularized it.
• Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said on The Verge’s “Decoder” podcast it’s about “being in the details.”
• Here’s what he says most people get wrong about “founder mode” and how he actually defines it.

Brian Chesky helped popularize the term “founder mode,” but he says some people have gotten it twisted.

In an episode of The Verge’s “Decoder” podcast, released Monday, the Airbnb CEO explained what people are misunderstanding about it.

The term “founder mode” was popularized in September by Y Combinator founding partner Paul Graham, who wrote that Chesky inspired it. Graham said that founders were too often working in “manager mode” while running their companies rather than getting involved in the nitty-gritty like they typically do in a company’s early days.

“First of all, people don’t know what founder mode is,” Chesky said on the podcast. “They think it means swagger. I remember a tweet that said, ‘I’m going founder mode on this burrito.’ I don’t know what that means.”

Chesky, who cofounded Airbnb in 2007, says, “That wasn’t the message.”

“If I could summarize founder mode in a couple sentences, it’s about being in the details,” he said. “It’s that great leadership is presence, not absence.”

He echoed a warning that other tech leaders, most famously Mark Zuckerberg, have issued about organizational bloat and extraneous levels of management in a company.

“And if you as a leader aren’t in the details, guess what? Your leaders aren’t in the details, and their leaders aren’t in the details,” Chesky said. One consequence, he said, was having layers upon layers of managers managing other managers but with “no experts in the company.”

Chesky said he puts founder mode in practice at Airbnb by having the company be “as functional as possible.”

“Functional just means expertise-based, not general management-based,” he said. “I’m the only non-functional person in the company; all functions roll up to me. I generally think the CEO should be the chief product officer of the company. The most important thing a company does is make a product. If the CEO is not the expert in the product, then why are they the CEO?”

Where a lot of founders go wrong, he said, is when “they let go of the product, and they abdicate responsibility.”

Operating in founder mode comes with the risk of micromanaging, Chesky said. He spoke of Steve Jobs, the late cofounder of Apple, whom Chesky says inspired much of his leadership style.

“He would skip levels, many levels, to be in the details, which somebody who goes to Harvard Business School would never do,” Chesky said. With Jobs, it “never felt like he was micromanaging because he was partnering with people on the details,” he added.

Chesky has previously named as other exemplars of founder mode Walt Disney, Elon Musk, Apple’s former chief design officer Jony Ive, and Airbnb’s head of marketing Hiroki Asai.

Being aware of the details allows you to weigh different trade-offs and courses of action when different divisions of the company can’t reach a consensus, according to Chesky.

“Leadership is presence in the details, and it’s not about being so-called autocratic because you’re not telling the experts what to do,” he said.