I've spoken to founders about this before, and pointed out something that not a single one of them had thought of until I pointed it out: The founder of the co

I've spoken to founders about this before, and pointed out something that not a single one of them had thought of until I pointed it out: The founder of the company stands to make generationally life changing money, the people they hire do not. Founder mode works because the founders are willing to spend every waking moment on work. They have time to get into the details of everything. And it's worth it for them because success could mean billions. It could mean they are set for life, as is the next 10 or 100 generations of their family. Steve Jobs -- Billionaire. Brian Chesky -- also a billionaire. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang . Basically anyone you would name as successfully running a company in founder mode is most likely a billionaire. It's worth it to them to scarface everything to spend every waking moment on work. But the people they hire don't have that incentive. Especially not anymore, with the way VCs are getting better at extracting value from companies. Exits for early employees aren't nearly life changing as they used to be, and exits for later employees at the stages we are talking about here are even worse.