Paul Graham's "founder mode" essay argues founders shouldn't fully delegate to specialists. Low-code tools are blurring lines between engineering, sales, and marketing, making everyone a technologist. The speaker urges founders to experiment and stay hands-on across multiple parts of the business.
Founder mode sits in between. Paul Graham, the venture capitalist or founder of Y Combinator, recently wrote this essay about founder mode where he's talking about how don't necessarily listen to business advice about completely delegating everything, and he's right. But the other thing is that the number of potential ways to run a business are just increasing. And that is a result of a lot of the technologies that we work with today. And I think particularly of low-code technologies, they're blurring the lines between what's being done by engineering and what's being done by sales and what's being done by marketing. Everybody is using technology and everybody has responsibility for pieces of the business. There's no book for this, right? Classic texts about division of labor and specialization don't cover the kinds of changes that we're going through right now. As things settle out, we're going to have more specialization, but that book has yet to be written. Write your own book, discover what's going to work for you. Be in founder mode.
