Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Nikki Haley is joining PR firm Edelman, Libby Wadle's J. Crew is bringing back its catalog, and 'founder mode' is the talk of Silicon Valley—but do women get to live it? Have a thoughtful Thursday.
- Female founder mode. Like the rest of the tech industry, Ellen DaSilva read Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham's viral essay on "founder mode" this weekend. The essay argues that founders excel by staying in the weeds even as their companies scale, not by following traditional business-school management practices. When DaSilva read it, she started thinking about how it applied to her own role as the founder of the pediatric telehealth startup Summer Health.
"I started to wonder how it would be perceived if I did that and how it would be perceived if a man in my position did that," she says.
It's a reflection that was shared by women throughout Silicon Valley—so much so that Airbnb cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky, whose talk on the topic inspired Graham to pen his essay, weighed in on Tuesday. “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 posted on X. "This needs to change.”
Founder mode has captured the attention of the tech industry. And it's just the latest example of a trend that applies to women differently. Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd responded to the piece on Instagram, saying she was "in founder mode for 10 years and got attacked for it every single day."
"It is different for women, it's just a fact."
The hallmarks of founder mode are sweating the details and engaging with employees throughout the organization rather than only through direct reports to the CEO, Graham wrote, with Steve Jobs as the quintessential example. Founders who run their companies in founder mode continue to experiment and trust their instincts, others add. (The alternative is "manager mode," Graham argues.) But female founders don't have an example like Jobs to model themselves after and are "not afforded the same luxury of interacting with their teams in that way," DaSilva says. And with few second chances, running on instinct carries a higher risk.
What might be seen as eccentricity and passion coming from a male founder often is seen as micromanagement from a female founder or a person of color. Employees sometimes respond poorly to harsh feedback coming from a female boss. An executive might bristle more if a female CEO bypasses them in favor of their reports. As Sara Mauskopf, cofounder and CEO of the childcare marketplace Winnie, says, "It's not easy for a woman to act like Elon Musk and get away with it." Instead, women have often been slotted into the manager role, from Sheryl Sandberg to the hires that followed her—the very style of leadership Graham rails against.
In conversations this week, founders referenced the spate of articles published over the past several years that were seen by some as "take-downs" of female founders as an example of why founder mode can be difficult for women. One in particular—the Verge story about Steph Korey's leadership at Away, which featured her Slack messages to an overworked customer service team—came up for founders as they reflected. "Part of founder mode is sometimes you have to be really tough and work harder than you would at a traditional large company," Mauskopf says. "Maybe she didn't do it in the nicest, most nurturing way, but to me that was the real embodiment of founder mode."
Ultimately, female founders feel pressured to squeeze into a narrow box—not a pushover, but not too aggressive. To do otherwise risks their reputations and the support of their boards and investors. Founder mode may not fit comfortably into that tiny space. Either the walls of the box have to break—or Silicon Valley needs to leave some room for women to craft a version of founder mode that works for their reality.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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