• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, October 10, 2024

I’ve been talking to my team a lot lately about the need to shift how we operate back to “start-up mode.” I believe that readopting start-up practices, even in companies that are many years past their founding days, creates significant advantages, promoting success in highly dynamic, fast-changing markets -- which certainly describes the world of TV and CTV advertising.

My preaching on start-up mode has put me -- a bit by accident, or maybe not -- in the middle of a debate that’s been playing out in Silicon Valley for more than a month, ever since Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky’s talk at a recent Y Combinator event about the challenges his company went through when it over-rotated into “manager-mode.” The talk sparked an essay by YC co-founder Paul Graham.

The essay compares “founder mode,” where the CEO is totally hands-on and manages the organization deeply and directly, to “manager mode,” where the CEO hires managers to run their departments and gives them the freedom to largely operate on their own. When Chesky moved into manager mode at Airbnb, the company went backwards -- not unlike, Graham observed, what happened at Apple before Steve Jobs famously returned to the company and launched products like the iPhone, which literally changed the lives of billions of people.

I’m not sure if my sense of operating in start-up mode is much different from the founder mode Chesky and Graham describe, but here are some of the elements of what it means to me:

Hands-on leadership. That means truly understanding how every function in the company operates, starting first and foremost with the company’s products. Yes, it can be a fine line with micro-managing. It can create anxiety among managers. It can be hard to get out of the weeds once you’re in them. But all these issues can be managed if you have enough self-awareness and team members confident in their abilities.

Merging of company and self. That means putting the company above self, living the clients’ problems and the company's solutions. It means living your team’s successes and failures. Does it make work/life balance hard? Of course. It’s really hard, but that’s what achieving start-up success takes.

Constantly communicating -- being a super-active communicator both within the company and across the market. Internally, it means separating communication from command, letting information flow freely up, down and across the organization. It means providing lots of transparency, and it must be authentic.

Scrappy and lean. You can’t move fast with lots of layers in your organization, if your teams pay homage to process over product, or if you spend money too freely. Understaffing is much, much better than over-staffing.

Curious, mission-driven, hard-working teams. You can’t be successful in a start-up market if your team members aren’t curious, mission-driven and hard-working.

Owning results, not just actions. To win in start-up markets, risk-taking must be the watchword. Your culture needs to promote constant experimentation and improvisation. Mistakes are to be expected, but they must be learned from, and not repeated. Acting with speed, decisiveness and always on learning and iteration are table stakes.

And then, in the end, it’s all about the results. And in the start-up world, the buck stops with the CEO.

Can this work in companies with many thousands of employees? Of course it can. That was what Chesky’s talk was all about. His point was that founders tend to get pressure to give up their start-up approaches as their companies gain scale, and manager mode leadership styles supplant founder mode approaches.

 For sure, larger organizations will need more structure and process than smaller ones, but if larger companies want to win in start-up defined markets, they need to embrace start-up mode leaders and operating modes.

What do you think?