Agency and accountability
Thoughts on Founder Mode at Palantir, and what it tells us about management
I want to share a few observations on how Founder Mode, as coined in Paul Graham’s recent essay, played out at Palantir. The person there I’d most associate with this phenomenon is Shyam Sankar, even if he’s an early employee rather than a founder.
At Palantir, Shyam kept an open line of communications with the company through emails, all-hands, and informal sessions. He could be blunt and hyperbolic1, but he was also the first to insist that he was not always right, and he would encourage staff to be quite blunt in telling him so.
My colleagues and I would need a moment to process his messages and discuss, sometimes in exasperation and sometimes in confusion, but I always appreciated his candor. However frustrating his messages could be, we never doubted that we had access to his unfiltered thoughts and ideas for the business. Bloodless corporate memos were not Shyam’s style, to say the least.
This is Founder Mode. Shyam’s messages filtered through the business and became actionable in our day-to-day work. We rarely encountered deployment challenges where we couldn’t deduce what Shyam would expect us to do.
I recall one time where we heard that a client that was engaged through a services partner was unhappy with their implementation project. We booked a meeting with the partner, flew over, and ignored their evident resentfulness at our comparatively junior status. The project was indeed a terrible mess. Could we meet the client? No, that was supposedly impossible. We pointedly ignored that and called around. The next day we were welcomed in by the client, with a rather stiff-faced manager from the partner in tow, and got to work fixing the project.
Here we were—two junior engineers who had just spent thousands of dollars on travel and jeopardised a partnership so that we could get to the fire. No reviews or approvals (or indeed much of a plan), but absolute certainty that this was what Shyam would want us to do. Without direct instructions, we understood that we had a clear mandate to get to the client’s problem and then solve it. We did both.
Palantir had less than 2,000 employees at the time, yet we were running a global operation. For all the shade Paul Graham throws at delegation in the essay, I think Palantir delegated extremely well, and the shared clarity on direction is what enabled that. Running in Founder Mode allowed us to achieve levels of delegation companies ten times the size don’t have.
But crucially—and the point I really want to make here—this clarity was paired with agency and accountability. We were empowered to make bold decisions and deploy considerable resources in pursuit of the strategy—to shoot for the moon. It was also clear to your peers, to Shyam, and to yourself if you weren’t delivering.
To me, this is what accountability is all about. Are you delivering on the strategic objectives of the business? The alternative ends up as box ticking—KPIs, internal compliance2, revenue, meetings, accounted for by quarter.
My former colleagues reading this will have rolled their eyes at my rose-tinted account more than once by now, but I’m sure they’ll agree that it captures our “X-factor”. The combination of high agency and high accountability was key to the value we would bring to the “normal” companies that became our clients.
Key to the success of Founder Mode companies is the understanding that accountability and agency go hand in hand.
Lessons for Manager Mode companies
It’s true that agency without accountability descend into tyranny—or chaos. Yet this understanding has manifested a cultural fear of power itself. Accountability without agency is mindless compliance culture—you can’t meaningfully be accountable if you can’t influence outcomes. Take one away and the other withers.
In Manager Mode, fear of power wears down agency. Once this happens, accountability duly follows suit—and is reduced, in many cases, to zero. A leader might say “the buck stops with me” (and mean it), but what good does it do if the buck never gets to them, or never starts moving in the first place?
We need to unlearn some of this fear to ward off stagnation in our institutions. It’s easy to agree in general terms that we need more accountability, but to be meaningfully accountable, people need to be trusted with real agency—or power.
It’s unlikely that there’s a way for mature companies to switch to Founder Mode, but they can still learn from the conspicuous absence of management as a stand-alone discipline in start-ups. Things are managed, but not by designated managers.
The lesson for companies in Manager Mode, or companies that are outgrowing Founder Mode, is that management isn’t a generic activity that can be divorced from the substance of what is being managed.
Only managers who understand what their reports do, often from having done it themselves, can be trusted with the power to enable their reports and hold them accountable. To credibly urge someone towards excellence, a manager needs to understand what great looks like.
Equally, to shield them from misguided accountability, the manager must be able to look at the ground truth behind the KPIs. There’s a huge difference in holding someone accountable for having shot for the moon and missed, versus just not doing their job very well.
You absolutely need people to shoot for the moon (and many lesser efforts below that), but a manager whose perspective is limited to tests passing and Jira-tickets resolved doesn’t have the agency to inspire their team to do it.
Thank you to several former colleagues who stopped rolling their eyes for long enough to give me invaluable feedback on drafts of this post.
Martin Seebach is an independent data architect and consultant with a long history working for Palantir. Details on his practice and how to get in touch at seebach.tech.
“Directionally correct” was a critical lens to apply
Inside Palantir — client compliance requirements are obviously inviolable
Great article, man...