Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky says women founders say they can't go 'founder mode' like men and that it needs to change
Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for Fast Company
- Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said women tell him they can't adopt "founder mode" like men.
- Chesky embraces founder mode, a strategy explained in a Paul Graham essay published Sunday.
- Chesky shared posts that said women founders have been "canceled" for practicing founder mode.
The tech world is abuzz with talk of "founder mode" this week, but not everyone in Silicon Valley feels like they can embrace the management strategy.
Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, gave a recent talk that inspired Paul Graham, a founding partner of the startup accelerator Y Combinator, to publish an essay Sunday on founder mode, which he described as a way to run a company that involves being more hands-on rather than delegating to a small number of direct reports.
Chesky chimed in after countless takes on social media about the concept.
"Women founders have been reaching out to me over the past 24 hours about how they don't have permission to run their companies in Founder Mode the same way men can," he said in a post on X. "This needs to change."
When someone asked what he meant by "permission," Chesky shared a screenshot of a 2020 headline from Business Insider that said, "The fall of the girlboss is actually a good thing." (The article is about a slew of female founders who stepped down amid allegations of a toxic work culture.)
Chesky also retweeted female founders who said women who practiced founder mode had been canceled for it.
In his essay on founder mode, Graham described it as the alternative strategy to the "manager mode," which he said was how most companies were run. He said the idea behind manager mode was "hire good people and give them room to do their jobs," but in practice it often meant "hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground."
Chesky, who co-founded Airbnb in 2008, said in another X post he was inspired to adopt founder mode by Jony Ive and Hiroki Asai, both formerly of Apple. He also said founders who embody many founder mode principles include Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, and Elon Musk.