Founder mode: Dare to vibe with tech’s latest buzzword

Scrolling through X today, past photos of Kamala Harris avoiding journalists’ questions by holding her phone to the side of her head while wearing Apple earbuds, I was painfully reminded why I have called her the first cyborg candidate and the first word-cloud candidate.

Then I remembered the Apple Vision Pro — remember that? — and the semi-viral videos accompanying the meh product’s initial hype blurp: tech bros wearing the thing while driving a Cybertruck, walking through the mall grandiosely swiping around windows and apps that only they could see. A naif could be excused for mistaking Kamala for a practitioner of the memeably absurd “beast mode” style of tech-world device-maxxing.

The whole point of the Kamala cult is to liberate citizens from any proper political education or contemplation altogether, unburdening them from what difficult details of self-governance have been.

But no one would mistake Harris for a founder — not of a company, not of a nation, not even of a cult, despite the fandom being manufactured around her.

A critic in the vein of Twain or Mencken might suggest that America has been running on cult leaders — the socioeconomic equivalent of an all vodka-Red Bull diet — for a dangerously long time. Today the secret is largely out that (as we covered at Return early this year) a lot of tech is really about talent-spotting cult leaders and “funding” them the way high-powered firms or family offices “fund” attorneys … so much so that today many techies and wannabe techies explicitly brand their operations as cults and themselves as leaders thereof.

It can be left to the reader to contemplate just how irresistibly the dark worlds of perversity and spycraft mingle with the realm of cults and for just how long.

On the other hand, few cults really work well as businesses, which is why, for the past quarter-century or so, the East Coast vector of the cult/workplace dynamic has run the opposite way from the West: The purpose of human resources is to turn corporations into cults, not the other way around. So there’s a certain logic to the tech industry taking the edge off the whole cult thing by refocusing on what a would-be cult leader could be that would actually be better for business.

Enter founder mode. Legendary VC Paul Graham dropped one of his legendary blog essays a few days ago minting the founder mode meme. In sum, he maintains, “There are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from the dismay of founders who've tried it, and the success of their attempts to escape from it.”

Importantly, he continues, “There are as far as I know no books specifically about founder mode. Business schools don't know it exists. All we have so far are the experiments of individual founders who've been figuring it out for themselves. But now that we know what we're looking for, we can search for it. I hope in a few years founder mode will be as well understood as manager mode. We can already guess at some of the ways it will differ.”

The details in the thesis are interesting, but still more interesting is the overall context, because until the 21st century, the character of the founder has been overwhelmingly more closely associated with politics than business. If the 1619 Project people and the borg they belong to hadn’t been so successful in nuking the Founding Fathers from the popular imagination, perhaps more Americans would still think of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, etc. than Jobs, Bezos, Musk, and so on. Maybe I’m a little ahead of the times in thinking we’re already there, but that’s certainly where we’re heading.

Yet the techies leaning hard into founder mode are themselves increasingly cognizant of the way that the founding spirit (or whatnot) is increasingly absent from political life, especially at the top, no matter how symbolic Biden’s use of the White House Franklin Roosevelt portrait might be. The whole point of the Kamala cult is to liberate citizens from any proper political education or contemplation altogether, unburdening them from what difficult details of self-governance have been.

“One cannot say it too often," wrote Tocqueville. "There is nothing more prolific in marvels than the art of being free; but there is nothing harder than the apprenticeship of freedom. It is not the same with despotism. Despotism often presents itself as the mender of all ills suffered; it is the support of good law, the sustainer of the oppressed, and the founder of order. Peoples fall asleep in the bosom of the temporary prosperity to which it gives birth; and when they awaken, they are miserable.”

Politically speaking, the post-Trump years have been, perhaps above all, the years of men in tech awakening to the alarming reality that America needs to be re-established on its foundations in order to survive — and that both political parties have failed to produce an elected official capable of carrying out this refounding.

This is something of a dilemma. Long before Silicon Valley arrived, the urge of American businessmen in America was to see politics as a kind of management task ancillary to the real work of leading a business. At the same time, however, with the emasculation and bureaucratization of the military, it’s hard to find any other executive talent pipeline into government besides business. The classical political theory of dictatorship is that decadent regimes must turn in the late game to men of iron, not men of money. However well intentioned or skilled any of us are in this knotty situation, we are all in fairly uncharted territory.

That is a big reason why we’re hosed without focusing attention on finding the spiritual aspect. For a better analogy than late-game pagan Rome, we should turn to the foggy years of the early-game Middle Ages, when the pious duke of Aquitaine founded numerous monasteries but none more notable than 1,114 years ago this September 11, Cluny Abbey — a pillar of order in the fractured post-Roman world focused primarily on liturgy and perpetual prayer. More illustrative still, in a way that bears deep reflection, is another founding monastic, St. Benedict, who owed his monastic life to a little-known figure with lessons for us all on the character of founders in an age of new frontiers: St. Romanus, a hermit monk who set up the wandering Benedict with a habit and a home — a cave above a Tiber tributary where Benedict would live for years before finally going founder mode.