> Whatever founder mode consists of, it's pretty clear that it's going to break the principle that the CEO should engage with the company only via his or her direct reports.
Jensen Huang (Nvidia) engages with only direct reports.
In 2010, my wife was interviewing CEOs as part of a school project. She emailed Jensen Huang out of the blue, to his email address @nvidia, and got a response and a live interview. There were a few others who were almost as accommodating, but, looking back on it from time to time, I'm still surprised by Jensen's openness and accessibility.
So I'm thinking that although he might engage only with direct reports, he's accessible to his company in a general sense.
I'm pretty sure the CEO of a tech company would be responsive to emails from individual contributors. At least below some frequency.
I'm completely sure that writing said email would deeply upset the reporting chain thus bypassed, plausibly in fired on the spot for unrelated reasons when they noticed.
I'm not sure he is a good example. He has 55 direct reports and that is not normal. My best manager nearly burned herself out with 28 direct reports, most of which were individual contributors as opposed to managers. Between what I have read and experienced, you can have more ICs under you the more senior and autonomous they are, but there is a limit and limiting direct reports to 8-12 is a good rule of thumb. It gives time to meet individually every two weeks, which Huang doesn't do
It's easy to sail a boat when the wind is behind you. It's during storms that you can see outstanding captains. When Nvidia was firing part of the CUDA core devs 3 years ago, he wasn't considered a genius internally.
Jensen Huang (Nvidia) engages with only direct reports.