Few people seem to have captured the Founder zeitgeist quite as successfully as Paul Graham, when he published his recent essay - Founder Mode - in response to a talk given by Airbnb Founder, Brian Chesky.

In it, he provocatively pushed back on what he perceives as the conventional leadership wisdom to ‘hire smart people and get out of their way’, suggesting instead that Founders have a unique mode in which they can run their company, not captured by books, MBAs or leadership schools of thought.

There have been many responses to ‘Founder Mode’ since - I think Tom Blomfield’s is perhaps the most thoughtful I’ve come across - so whilst there’s much to scrutinise and debate about the concept of Founder mode, I’m not going to add to the noise on that front. Instead I’m going to take a meta view and pose the question - why is it that in a community of innovators and disruptors (Founders), so many seem to have been a) railroaded into doing something they didn’t agree with? And b) Needed to rely on someone else to point this out to them?

To me, Founder Mode - both the circumstances that led to it being written, and the collective shift in thought that seemed to happen as a result of it being published - point towards a lack of truly independent thought and a level of groupthink that’s problematic in an industry so focused on innovation.

We’ve seen this in action time and again recently - mass layoffs spread like wildfire, in some cases as a rational response to a change in funding environment, but in others through an apparent desire to jump on the collective bandwagon, even to the point of copy-pasting the same layoff announcement email - we expanded too fast; we take responsibility…. I’d argue we’ve seen something similar in the sentiment shift of in-office vs. remote working. Does the best of innovation really arise from this kind of homogenous thinking and culture? Where are those breaking from the herd?

Of course there are many who do break from the herd, but this takes a real courage in ones convictions to do. Investors, advisors, industry thought-leaders, conferences etc. create an almost gravitational force to draw Founders into certain ways of doing things, sometimes without even stopping to question whether they believe in them or not. So whilst there is plenty I disagree with in ‘Founder Mode’, there seems to be an underlying call-to-arms for independent thought to break this gravitational force that I align with. (The irony is not lost on me that the call-to-arms comes from an investor - such a strong part of that gravitational force towards the norm - but let’s park that for now.)

It’s not that ‘conventional wisdom’ or ‘best practice’ are inherently bad, it’s simply that innovation, commensurate with the challenges of today, calls for us to foster more independent thought - not just about what we build, but how we build it - and this, I believe, is where wisdom comes in.

‘Wisdom’ - to my mind - is the development of faculties to see through collective and self-deception to one’s own true sense of what is right. That sounds grandiose, so to put it another way it’s knowing not to put a fruit like tomato in a fruit salad. I certainly wouldn’t label myself as wise, but I do believe that cultivating wisdom is a part of all of our life’s work, and in the case of Founders, I see this work as greatly important.

At their best, startups and the innovation that comes with them can be a catalyst for positive change in the world; at their worst, they can be the opposite. I think the Founders who put in the work required to cultivate their own wisdom are more likely to succeed in ways that benefit not just them but society as a whole. I believe we all can win in the age of the Wise Founder.