Silicon Valley’s current fascination with a trendy management meme illustrates a broader and more troubling turn in certain powerful pockets of its culture — one that has seized our politics and could even unduly influence our election (again).
I’m talking about founder mode. A recently coined management style being celebrated by some venture capitalists, it embraces the notion that a company’s founder must make decisions unilaterally rather than partner with direct reports or frontline employees. All too often the extension of founder mode is to resist not only internal checks and balances but also those from the government.
I see founder mode as another expression of a creeping attraction to one-man rule in some corners of tech. (I use “man” intentionally, as only 3 percent of venture capital funding goes to solo female founders.) This neo-authoritarianism is nothing short of a rejection of the historical values that made Silicon Valley what it is today. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that a handful of the wealthiest and most powerful venture capitalists there are throwing their resources behind the re-election of Donald Trump.
This view of the world is the antithesis of what I most love about Silicon Valley, which has its roots in a rebellious anti-authoritarianism. In 1957 eight engineers quit Shockley Semiconductor and founded Fairchild Semiconductor, which built transistors and integrated circuits, because they were frustrated by their boss’s megalomaniacal refusal to listen to them. Then in 1968 two of those founders, frustrated by the way their bosses at Fairchild were treating them, quit to start a chipmaker called Intel.
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. When rebels became kings, they got deposed. Command and control kills innovation.
That history explains why, in the early days of Google, its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, wanted to avoid becoming despotic bosses, no matter how much the company grew. At first they eliminated engineering manager roles, only to learn that chaos is just as bad as autocratic leadership. So they opted for checks and balances, electing to build management systems that systematically stripped unilateral decision-making authority from all managers — all the way up to the founders and chief executive. At Google the idea of one-person rule seemed illogical and bound to fail. Why hire the smartest people in the world, only to refuse steadfastly to listen to a word they say?
Founder mode invokes Steve Jobs, revealing a misunderstanding of what made Apple’s chief executive legendary. Edwin Catmull, a co-founder of Pixar and a close associate, says Mr. Jobs failed when he acted like a jerk and succeeded when he learned to be a better manager and learned to work with great leaders like Tim Cook, then his chief operating officer, now Apple’s chief executive. Mr. Jobs 2.0 said, “We hire people to tell us what to do, not the other way around.”
It was his better side that won him the fierce loyalty of the managers he hired, including Jony Ive, Apple’s superstar designer. Not only did Mr. Jobs not ignore his direct reports; he had close relationships with them. Mr. Ive referred to Mr. Jobs as his closest friend. Mr. Cook offered Mr. Jobs part of his liver after Mr. Jobs was diagnosed with cancer. Mr. Jobs refused.
Autocratic leadership, whether in a corporation or a nation-state, is a negative-sum game. On the basis of innumerable research papers, Robert L. Sutton, the author of “Good Boss, Bad Boss,” concluded that when a person who bullies others is removed from a team, the performance of that team improves — even when the bully was a high performer. In her book “The Fearless Organization,” Amy C. Edmondson showed that a team unafraid to speak truth to power performs better. Her research and Google studies that examined what makes teams successful have demonstrated what we all know in our gut: that the bloviating bully taking up all the air in the room is not a leader but a value destroyer. And also damned unpleasant to work with.
Many of Silicon Valley’s greatest products were originally intended to liberate, not to control people. Apple sought to create “a bicycle for the mind” or “the computer for the rest of us.” Google was trying to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
A decade ago, we were celebrating Twitter as a force for democracy. The messaging platform played a role in helping organize the Arab Spring, a series of anti-authoritarian uprisings that spread across much of the Arab world in the early 2010s. Black Twitter helped get #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter trending. Social media was not supposed to be controlled by the Man. The early promise was to allow us to talk to one another, peer to peer.
Then as these platforms grew, money poured in. Content moderation was hard and expensive. The platforms caused harm but gave birth to multibillionaires and even centaurs — people worth not a mere $1 billion but over $100 billion. So much money offers its own kind of absolute power and regulatory capture.
Since buying Twitter in 2022, the centaur Elon Musk has been using the platform to reinforce his personal views. He fired about 80 percent of employees, unilaterally decided to rename it X and has no compunction about using the platform to support his chosen candidate, Mr. Trump, and to spread disinformation about Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Not only did Mr. Musk fire most of the people who were tasked with identifying and eliminating disinformation; he reposts it himself.
Since Mr. Musk bought it, the company’s reported value plummeted to about $12.5 billion as of January 2024, down from the $44 billion purchase price. Maybe buying Twitter was just a bad investment, but an even more frightening hypothesis is that it was worth $31.5 billion to Mr. Musk, who is still worth $260 billion, to silence his opponents. This is how founder mode theory gets dangerous not just for investors but also for all of us.
Then there’s the disgraced FTX chief, Sam Bankman-Fried. One of his staff members once told a prospective investor raising questions about his unchecked authority to go take a hike (in much cruder terms). Mr. Bankman-Fried accepted no checks on his power — not from a board of directors, not from employees, not from the government. Investors loved his style, and he was able to raise $1.9 billion, only for his abuses to eventually land him in prison and lose FTX’s investors a lot of money.
Most people in Silicon Valley understand the role that checks and balances play in corporate governance and in a well-functioning society that offers rebels a chance to improve the world without dominating it. The venture capitalist and entrepreneur Reid Hoffman has explained why the rule of law is essential for innovation to flourish in Silicon Valley.
However, a few of the noisiest and most powerful — like Mr. Musk and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz — are now embracing what feels like techno-authoritarianism. One of the firm’s co-founders, Marc Andreessen, who is on the board of Meta, wrote a manifesto last year with a “Becoming Technological Supermen” section, in which he said, “There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.” He is quoting the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s 1909 “Manifesto of Futurism.” Mr. Marinetti was also famous as an author of the 1919 “Fascist Manifesto.” (Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz’s co-founder, recently announced that he would make a donation to help elect Harris, after having previously endorsed Mr. Trump.)
Rather than winning in a free market by attracting customers, these would-be strongmen seek a different leverage point: a single authority operating in founder mode to eliminate the obstacles standing between them and so much power and wealth that it is impossible to disrupt them, no matter how much damage they do. In other words, they turned to Mr. Trump. (There’s a misperception that Silicon Valley is full of Trump supporters. That’s not accurate. Over 800 venture capitalists have signed their support for Ms. Harris.)
A few Trump supporters like Mr. Andreessen and Mr. Musk seem to believe the presidency is for sale. After previously expressing skepticism of cryptocurrency, Mr. Trump had a sudden change of heart last summer. First he tapped JD Vance, who was an early protégé of the venture capitalist Peter Thiel and who has been pushing a light touch on crypto regulation, to be his running mate. Then Mr. Trump showed up at the Bitcoin 2024 conference vowing to fire the Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, Gary Gensler, an appointee of President Biden’s whose tough-on-crypto approach may help explain why Andreessen Horowitz’s flagship crypto fund plummeted 40 percent in value in 2022. If Mr. Trump wins and if he honors any implicit or explicit quid pro quo — two very big ifs — the bet will pay off.
Will authoritarianism win the day? Will founder mode continue to worm its way through Silicon Valley? I do not believe it will, for the simple reason that it doesn’t work. It may be brutal, but it is also incompetent.
Emotional dysregulation, bullying and bloviating are not leadership attributes. People who cannot manage themselves should not manage others. Leaders who can self-regulate understand the wisdom of accepting checks and balances on their own power from employees, boards and the government. Humanity’s superpower is our ability to collaborate. Great leaders, including great founders, know how to bring people together and help them work better together. They create hierarchies that optimize for collaboration, not domination.
The authoritarian playbook can be seductive. Coercive leaders can appear to get lots done in the short run, especially when they promise special treatment to their supporters. But in the long run, they damage lives, companies and even democracies.
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