I thought the discourse around “founder mode” had died down but Kim Scott the author of the best selling book Radical Candor decided to link the meme to what she considers a so-called rise of “neo-authoritarianism” in Silicon Valley culture in an op-ed in the New York Times. Naturally it’s about Trump too.
My read on her thesis is that she has decided to use a technique she disavows in her own work; the frame of the piece is manipulative insincerity. It’s an unclear criticism being used for political gain.
She works to convince the reader that actually the most libertarian and individualistic demographic, who regularly decries state power (especially its use of coercion to drive censorship, limit transactions and restrict compute), are in fact, actually vouching for totalitarianism.
Even the graphic hints at the supposed appreciation of neo-monarchy as a nod to nRX intellectual Curtis Yarvin.
I fear she firmly missed the point of founder mode for her insincere political framing. Despite her clear understanding of our values.
In that original recipe, venture capitalists invested in founders rebelling against established hierarchy and building great products. And when those rebels themselves became too hierarchical, venture capitalists turned to new founders aspiring to overtake the old order.
She is right about we prefer to work as an industry and how we see our efforts. “Many of Silicon Valley’s greatest products were originally intended to liberate, not to control people.”
And yet missed she missed that founder mode is about liberating our founding teams from the suffocation of professional management. It’s got nothing at all to do with justifying tyrannical founders.
Rather founder mode is about limiting the tyranny of managers who can stymie progress despite having little personal responsibility for the success of the firm. In another world, she might have written a sequel called Radical Responsibility about fixing this problem.
Larger firms have a pantheon of corporate departments to ensure smooth governance from legal, to HR, to corporate communications in order to comply with state expectations.
As regulations have ballooned so too have the specialties required by the middle managers. We must be in compliance. We must take everything and every view into account. We must do things by the book.
Founder mode isn’t about running ripshod over your people. It’s certainly not about Trumpian declarations of what must be done. She’s absolutely correct that “emotional dysregulation, bullying and bloviating are not leadership attributes”
I find her criticism to be manipulative insincerity. She’s deliberately missed the point of the original Paul Graham essay, inserted her own political insinuations about how Silicon Valley is hiding their true preferences for authoritarians while herself advocating for a pass the buck culture. It’s not fit for Radical Candor and I’d expect better from someone of her stature.