- "Founder mode" is not about "swagger," one of the founders who popularized the term said.
- 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 defines it.
Brian Chesky helped popularize the term "founder mode," but he says some people have gotten it twisted.
On an episode of The Verge's "Decoder" podcast, released Monday, the Airbnb CEO explained what he thought people were misunderstanding about it.
The term founder mode was popularized in September by the Y Combinator founding partner Paul Graham, who said 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, added: "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 put founder mode into 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 nonfunctional 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?"
A lot of founders go wrong, he said, when "they let go of the product, and they abdicate responsibility."
Operating in founder mode comes with the risk of micromanaging, Chesky added. He spoke with Steve Jobs, a cofounder of Apple, saying the influential leader 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; Jony Ive, 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, Chesky said.
"Leadership is presence in the details," he added, "and it's not about being so-called autocratic because you're not telling the experts what to do."
Axel Springer, Insider Inc.'s parent company, is an investor in Airbnb.