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DS Dave Smith Dave Smith Software developer who co-hosts Soft Skills Engineering, a weekly advice show for software engineers.

“I would define founder mode as a label you can put on seemingly bad or random behavior so that it looks cooler. And it's something you can tell investors, like, well, I went in founder mode. And it's like, yeah, but it didn't work.”

Soft Skills Engineering · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026

“I would define founder mode as a label you can put on seemingly bad or random behavior so that it looks cooler. And it's something you can tell investors, like, well, I went in founder mode. And it's like, yeah, but it didn't work.” — Dave Smith, Soft Skills Engineering

Context

A staff engineer wrote in about a founder who went 'full founder mode' and now runs the tiny team top down. Asked how he would define the term, Dave Smith gives his cynical definition before offering some more charitable readings.

Listen to the episode → More from Dave Smith → More Hands-On Engineering Podcasts quotes →

Transcript

Soft Skills Engineering Around 21:18 into the episode
Dave Smith

Yeah.

Jamison Dance

The full founder mode thing is interesting. Are you familiar with the phrase founder mode, Dave?

Dave Smith

Oh, yes. That got popularized, I think, last year. That's when it hit my radar.

Jamison Dance

Yeah. I mean, how would you define it? It's sort of like you just do things instead of try to align groups of people kind of more top-down, more action-oriented, more tell people to do stuff and do stuff yourself. Is that it?

Dave Smith

I would define founder mode as a label you can put on seemingly bad or random behavior so that it looks cooler. And it's something you can tell investors, like, well, I went in founder mode. And it's like, yeah, but it didn't work.

Jamison Dance

Yeah, but that's founder mode. You miss every shot

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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“I also learned that you can just win by writing it down. If you write down, here is the decision, we are all doing it, that can get this ball rolling faster.” — Jamison Dance, Soft Skills Engineering “The less I know the code, the more I say, yeah, it's probably fine. And the more I know it, the more I have that interaction of, no, this will be bad for us. We do not want it that way.” — Jamison Dance, Soft Skills Engineering