Founder Mode took the tech world by storm last week. The dissonance between traditional management theory and Founder Mode struck a chord of truth for founders who experienced scaling a company.
But as Paul Graham mentioned, you can’t run a 2,000-person company the way you run a 20-person one. So how do you bring Founder Mode to scale? We believe the missing leverage is context.
Founders have more context than anyone else in the company.
When you run a 20-person company, you know 95%+ of the important information. When you scale the business, staying at 95% is virtually impossible without seeking additional context.
And context opens two singular gates.
First, context empowers founders to make high conviction decisions faster than anyone else.
As biological parents of the company, to borrow from Brian Chesky, founders know exactly how everything – every product, every policy, every team – was assembled. Empowered by the thousands of context-infused decisions they made to build the company, they can act on those decisions with speed, efficacy and efficiency.
When start-ups get bigger (150+ employees) they often start acting like 1,500-person companies. When they hit 1,500, they act like 15,000. This is aspirational but misguided. Speed is the core advantage of a start-up. It is the one thing incumbents can’t replicate. Context unlocks Founder Mode and Founder Mode unlocks speed while traditional management theory kills it.
Second, context means founders can confidently identify the company’s most valuable problem and focus their full attention on resolving it.
To quote Frank Slootman (who built ServiceNow and is now Chairman of Snowflake), “the fastest way to move a dial is narrow the focus.” People naturally resist focus because they don’t have the guts to decide what is important and devote their attention to it. Professional managers are masters at hedging their bets. Founder Mode means deciding what matters most and going all in.
So, how do you maintain founder-level context when your team grows beyond 150 people (Dunbar’s number)? That is the problem we are solving at Parable.
As an organization grows, context is hard to come by. Information barriers, narrative bias and politics creep in. The CEO ends up with lagging performance indicators as the only inputs to determine whether or not teams are aligned, focused and tracking towards their goals.
At Parable, we approach this through the lens of time. We believe time is your company's most valuable resource. Our AI solution contextualizes and visualizes the proportion of time being spent on mission-critical projects and actions, and how much is leaking to bureaucracy and bloat. This contextual data empowers executives to drive alignment, extreme focus and speed. They can operate like founders again.
We love talking to people passionate about time, context, speed and Founder Mode so hit us up if you want to chat.
