, consultant Ichak Adizes identified the founder’s trap, a major challenge when a new company has moved beyond infancy into the dizzying expansion of the go-go phase. The company is now outgrowing the founder’s capabilities to implant their personal leadership styles and philosophies. “Founders are simultaneously their companies’ biggest assets and biggest risks,” he warned.
Silicon Valley essayist and computer scientist Paul Graham figures the heart of the problem is that the entrepreneurs were being told how to run a company they hadn’t founded – how to run it as if merely a professional manager. “There are things founders can do that managers can’t, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because it is,” heHe feels there are two different ways to run a company: Founder mode and manager mode.
But as she pondered the issue, she moved past that instinctive reaction. “The most extraordinary companies in technology are run by intense, brilliant founders. Those companies are built in the image of their founder and are most successful when the company learns how to act like the founder at scale – how to think, build and ship the way the founder would,” she writes on herThe intensity of the founder must be maintained.
So did Tobi Lütke at Shopify, since its 2006 founding. “People have accused Shopify of being a book club thinly veiled as a public company,” he noted a few years ago in an interview with, journalist Larry MacDonald shows how Mr. Lütke was aided in trying to maintain entrepreneurial intensity by the fact the company’s product was designed to help entrepreneurs gain and boost online sales.