In September 2024, Paul Graham published an essay on his personal site called Founder Mode. Just under two thousand words. Simple language. The argument was this: founders of startups are taught to run a company as if they were professional CEOs — delegate, trust, let go — and this ruins them, because founders have a knowledge of the product and a decision speed that no external manager can replicate.
For a month, the piece occupied public discourse in the global startup ecosystem. It was cited, rewritten, parodied, demolished. It had its backlash, its backlash-of-the-backlash, and finally its place as a flag-concept of an era.
Then 2025 happened.
Last year startups stopped making the news for their ideas and started making the news for their layoffs. The venture capital industry restructured. Three of the most-loved Italian scaleups ended up in emergency acquisitions. Another six died in silence. Those that survived, we saw again at the Italian Tech Week last October, and they told us a truth that's worth writing down.
The founder mode Paul Graham talked about in 2024, in 2026, in Italy, is dead. At least in that form.
And it's precisely for this reason that it becomes interesting again.
What the essay really said (net of the parody)
To orient ourselves, it's worth remembering what Graham said net of the meme.
The essay was born from a conversation with Brian Chesky, founder of Airbnb. Chesky recounted that, after being pushed toward a manager mode model (delegate to teams, trust middle levels, climb up), his company had started losing energy. When he'd returned to founder mode — direct involvement on product decisions, small meetings, communication that skips levels — the company had started moving again.
Graham generalized. He said that the difference between a founded company and a managed company is structural. Founders aren't better CEOs, they're different CEOs. Replacing a founder with a professional CEO is almost always the moment a company stops being itself.
The essay was brilliant. It was also, reading it today, slightly romantic.
What happened after 2025
The Italian startups that survived 2025 — a year in which Italian Series A rounds collapsed by about a third compared to 2023, and in which Italian late-stage practically stopped — aren't those that best applied founder mode. They are those that understood that founder mode wasn't a pose, it was an organ of sense.
Let me explain.
In 2024, around Graham's essay, a kind of mythology had spread: the founder who shows up at the senior team meeting and makes decisions in 15 minutes, the founder who asks to see operational metrics every Friday, the founder who skips six hierarchical levels to talk directly to a developer. Everyone wanted to do it. Everyone thought that was founder mode.
It was a caricature. And in 2025, under real pressure, it broke.
Founders who did founder mode as caricature — micromanagement dressed up as vision — burned their senior team. Capable people left. When the liquidity squeeze came, there was no one experienced in the company anymore to handle it. Game over.
Founders who did founder mode as competence are still here. They knew which decisions they had to make (product, positioning, strategic go/no-go) and which they didn't (compensation, HR processes, daily operational management). They knew when to skip a level and when, instead, to trust their VP. They knew how to recognize their areas of differential value and disarm the temptation to stick their nose in everywhere.
In other words: the original founder mode was a diagnosis, not a prescription. It was saying "if you feel like a manager, you have a problem". It wasn't saying "behave this way".
What we've seen
We see the Italian startup ecosystem very closely — both as an agency, and now that we ourselves are a young product company with OpificioAI, Tuken, and three products in the pipeline. Allow us three pointed observations, gathered in the field.
First observation. Italian founders who held up in 2025 have one thing in common that is the opposite of the cliché. They're not control freaks. They're surgical interventionists. They know how to spend days outside the meeting room, months without intervening on a team, and then drop on a specific decision with total intensity, decide, and go back to doing other things. Their founder mode is a mode that turns on and off. It's not a tone.
Second observation. None of the strong founders of 2026 define themselves as founder mode founders. They stopped talking about it. When you meet those who do talk about it, usually, it's because they're using it as an excuse to justify things that aren't working.
Third observation. The opposite mistake — manager mode disguised as maturity — is equally widespread and equally lethal. Founders who, under pressure, stopped making product decisions, delegated the pitch to heads-of, dropped the presidency over brand identity to a new VP Marketing recruited from abroad. Same result: the senior team progressively substituted for them, and the product stopped resembling their head. Six months later, investors say "we don't understand what you want to do anymore". Right.
The honest point on the Italian ecosystem
The founder mode discourse in Italy is, by the way, a slightly luxury discourse. To apply it, you need to have a company with at least fifty people and a formed middle-management team. Most of our scaleups aren't there. They're still at the previous step — the one where the founder is the company, and the only problem is figuring out how to stop being it without killing it.
For family SMEs that are transforming into tech-enabled companies — a trend we see growing — the problem is even different: there the founder is often the father or mother, and founder mode isn't discussed, it's endured. The real problem is not whether to apply it. It's how to transition it to a new generation without the transition coinciding with the end of the company. It's a huge, very Italian, under-told issue. We'll come back to it in another piece.
The new diagnosis
If the founder mode of 2024 was a diagnosis ("you're not a manager, stop pretending"), the founder mode of 2026 is a finer diagnosis: can you distinguish decisions that change the nature of the company from those that manage it?
The first are yours. The second aren't.
The first are few, brutal, counterintuitive, and almost always include a "no" said to someone very capable who's asking you for a promotion, an investment, a different course. The second are many, repetitive, need processes, and almost always require you to stay quiet.
Confusing the two is the most expensive mistake of a founder. Doing it in both directions is symmetrically disastrous: those who treat process decisions as nature decisions paralyze the company; those who treat nature decisions as process decisions lose it.
The mature founder mode is this ability to distinguish. It's an art. You don't learn it from a blog post. You learn it by having lost something.
If you're lucky, 2025 taught you. If you're not, 2026 will.
Thursday, June 4, we go back to the tech glossary with a new episode of our #ParoleDifficili series. Topic: embedding. What a star map has to do with your company's search engine — spoiler, a lot.
Are you navigating a scale or ownership transition in your company? We help Italian startups and SMEs define brand identity and strategy in transformation phases. Let's talk.