Let’s talk about the Founders who aren’t in the news.

None of the events from the last week surprise me. As a self described People Geek with Decade+ of intimate exposure and understanding for the talent machine of the tech industry I can see exactly how we got here. Government regulation (which really is the last resort and a necessary thing) is a start and absolutely needed, but at the human level something deeper must happen.

Here’s a start.

The founder worship and turning a blind eye to their less than becoming traits has got to stop. Tech is a Founder obsessed culture. To illustrate this point here is a little anecdote that signals the nuance and breadth of this reality. One Founder once told me about the secret language among this elite club of founders. Specifically, when someone (and many do) introduces themselves as a Founder in the Bay Area there is a nuance. Do they say ‘successful founder’ OR simply ‘founder’. The former is a signal (cultural ritual perhaps?) to those in the know of exactly what their status is. A successful founder is someone who has grown there business to a point where they were either acquired or went public. They embody what it means to be successful in that culture and thereby should be held at a higher regard. This nuanced signal to others sets them aside.

For those inside the industry we see the Founder Worship at various levels of detail depending on our role. We are all subjected to it. We see what gets rewarded and celebrated, we’ve reported to a founder ourselves, work (ed) for a founder led business, have been told to be more strategic and innovative like a founder among other things.

Founders are made out to be the pinnacle of success and celebrated as such. They often times are given so much latitude both inside their own companies as well as across the industry that their own ego wreaks havoc without any recourse. Wreaks havoc of course if they don’t take the responsibility seriously. Some do take that job seriously, but the ones we here about more often don’t. In fact at times the negative impact of their personalities / approach wreak havoc far larger than the original value of their ground breaking idea. I’ve witnessed the rationalization of said behavior in talent reviews and decision making conversations about whether we would buy a business or not through comments like “well they are a founder, that’s just who they are. The risk of losing their contribution [aka value] is too big [to actually hold them accountable].” I call BS on that. We can do better and we should.

TLDR of this point is: The founders that are more often celebrated externally and inside of organizations are given privileged treatment both via pay and status that it takes a special breed of human to push that aside and do the right thing. Those people exist, but they are not the founders we read about publicly, but I think they should be.

This next section is for the skeptics.

Quality Human Founders do Exist.

Based on my career to date and working with hundreds of founders at one of the most emotionally intense intersections of their founding journey I can say that they are all NOT what we see in the news. Many are humble, curious, comfortable with risk and incredible problem solvers. This is true agnostic of national country of origin. They enjoy the autonomy that comes with doing your own thing and get an adrenaline bump at the risk-reward trade off of experimenting and potentially losing it all. The world needs this mindset to create progress, but the world does not need everyone to have this mindset.

What if we thought about Founders as important people part of a larger system? Celebrate the ones that not only create break through ideas and change AND also are role models of authentic humble leadership?

I was lucky enough to conduct a research project while at Autodesk with my colleagues Erin Bradner, Sam Tyers and Elsie Bisnett. We called it the Acquired Mind study and conducted a series of qualitative interviews to understand the emotional experience of a founder from inception of potential acquisition (ie, when Autodesk first engaged with them about potentially buying their business) through to integration (when they and their team were ultimately part of the bigger system of Autodesk). We sought to understand the experience of Founders as they went from entrepreneur to internal innovator and often times leader of a larger team or organization. We used natural language processing to understand common threads among their experiences and mapped their journey across the typical cycle of a deal to better understand their experience. It was fascinating and if interested I’m always happy to share what we learned.

The ‘quick and dirty’ of what we found was that their experience was exactly what you would expect if you think about it from a human behavior perspective. There are two aspects that I think are really important for non-founders / outsiders to understand:

- They grapple with giving up control of all decisions and what that will look like. They think through the tradeoff that control (and responsibility for others pay checks) for an opportunity to be part of a larger system and have access to more resources and potential customers (and impact!). Yes, there is money in it for them, but they universally step through this decision process and I can say as the person that sat with them through it how they think about it indicates a lot about who they are. Many of them are human at the most fundamental level and demonstrate all the emotions any of us non-founders would hope would be the case*

- They worry deeply about what is going to happen to the people that helped them get to this moment. The employees that made a choice to follow them and their vision for what problem they could solve. The founders obsess over every little detail on how this change is going to impact those people and invest extra effort into the communication and execution of said messaging.

*when they don’t demonstrate this it’s a signal to the receiving organization that is often rationalized and rarely dealt with.

These weren’t just platitudes they gave us in the interviews. I know these things to be true because in all of the cases which we researched I was the person, the leader, partnering with them. We worked together closely to talk through what jobs and pay their teams would have once the transaction closed. Sometimes it meant there weren’t jobs for individuals and that was the most painful part of the process because they and I both knew the decision to sell the business was going to become one of the worst days of a person’s life. We both put great effort into treating all of their team with respect, but those people in particular with a particular level of respect. I know we didn’t do this perfectly but we did everything we could which is a start. The level of care and concern I saw in the founders always struck me as deeply human.

This is not a love note to Founders. My point here is that we should see Founders for what they are and amplify the good things and be realistic about their role in the system and adjust our organizational and external narrative accordingly.

If you are a Founder that does not mean you are a capable Leader.

One of the systemic issues I see — which is solvable — is that we have to stop thinking that Founders are universally also capable leaders. That is just not true and if we don’t face the facts on this point we will get more of the same. I also think many Founders I have met would be relieved to be told this is not expected of them. There are some (I have examples if you’d like) that actually do have this ability and that is awesome. However, there are others that very much don’t and shouldn’t be asked to be that nor held up as that when everyone around them can see that it will never be true. It is bad for them as a human and on a bigger level really bad for the world at large because founders in tech have an outsized impact on our day to day lives.

I have many more thoughts on other systemic changes that we could make to change the culture of tech. However, for now I need to go spend time with my family in the great outdoors. I’d love to hear your thoughts, ideas, observations, criticisms and anything really on this topic or anything related to the culture of work.

PS: My father, who is a trained journalist, has pointed out many times that I could be better with punctuation and grammar. Apologies in advance as I am still working on it and probably always will be. ✌🏼❤️🌵