Founder or manager mode: What's better for your startup?
The founder versus manager debate isn't a new one, but it's relevant in every startup ecosystem worth its funding
Perhaps the next time Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy is on a public platform, a fresh question to him should be: What would he do in those 14-odd hours that he would be on the job six days a week? That Murthy favours a 70-hour work week and that in the early days of Infosys—from 1981 to 1994—he used to work “at least 85 to 90 hours a week” is now part of corporate folklore and social media chatter (and banter). “That has not been a waste,” Murthy had told The Economic Times in 2023. So what would Murthy do in those long days of doggedness and diligence—when he was in ‘founder mode’? That answer could be pieced together by compiling the achievements of Infosys in the two decades that Murthy was the hands-on CEO.
These would include playing a pivotal role in making Indian IT services a global story, with over $200 billion in software services exports in fiscal year 2024. And, as important would be Murthy’s role in setting standards in transparency in corporate governance.
Murthy’s long hours would be a fair indicator of his eye on the big picture as well as on the minutiae. In an interview in 2006, he let on that he was “as comfortable taking part in a highly strategic decision as being involved in the nitty-gritty of execution”.
To be sure, long before the ‘founder mode’ debate blew up in Silicon Valley a few months ago, Murthy may have been following a similar approach that Brian Chesky recommended. The Airbnb co-founder and CEO inspired Y Combinator’s (YC) founding partner Paul Graham to pen a blog on why founder mode is a more effective way of running a company than ‘manager mode’.
At a YC event in September, Chesky spoke about why, when scaling a company, the advice he received to “hire good people and give them room to do their jobs” wasn’t the best. It didn’t work for Airbnb; its fortunes turned around smartly when he took back control, in part inspired by Apple founder Steve Jobs.
