The buzz in tech circles over the past few days is all about “Founder Mode.”

Sparked by a recent talk at Y Combinator from Airbnb founder and CEO Brian Chesky — and a subsequent blog post from former YC leader Paul Graham — the debate focuses on how startup founders can be most effective at growing their companies.

“As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised [Chesky] that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale,” Graham writes. “Their advice could be optimistically summarized as ‘hire good people and give them room to do their jobs.’ He followed this advice and the results were disastrous.”

Graham challenges the conventional wisdom that founders should switch from “founder mode” to “manager mode” when they want to scale.

Rather than hiring new managers and getting out of the way, it might actually be better for founders to micromanage and be directly involved with all company operations, Graham writes.

Based on the reaction and commentary so far, there is no one-size-fits-all approach.

Take leaders of Seattle-area tech giants Amazon and Microsoft, for example.

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon out of his Bellevue, Wash., garage in 1994. He remained CEO as the company grew into an e-commerce and cloud computing behemoth, and didn’t step down until 2021.

Bezos could be described as a “founder mode” leader.

“Bezos & Zuck were both micro-managers, deep in the details of the product and business,” wrote Dan Rose, a former Amazon and Facebook exec. “They never set expectations of autonomy, and they fired anyone who resisted their oversight.”

Years of hands-on experience “gives founders as much, if not more, subject matter expertise as the top experts,” wrote Stephan Curial, CTO at Amazon seller software company Jungle Scout. He added that “they also have the advantage of a broader perspective due to the multifaceted nature of their role.”

On the other end of the spectrum, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella offers a “Hall of Fame” example of executing in “manager mode,” wrote Henrik Torstensson, a veteran entrepreneur and startup investor.

Nadella preaches a culture of individual empowerment.

“Every one of us needs to do our best work, lead and help drive cultural change,” he wrote to employees in his first company-wide memo. “We sometimes underestimate what we each can do to make things happen and overestimate what others need to do to move us forward. We must change this.”

Nadella was not a founder, but he had spent 22 years at the Redmond company before becoming its third CEO in 2014. Since then, Microsoft’s market capitalization has skyrocketed from around $300 billion to $3 trillion.

A similar example is Apple CEO Tim Cook, who replaced Steve Jobs in 2011. Apple’s market cap has also grown to more than $3 trillion.

Torstensson noted the nuance of the discussion.

“Managing organizations is not easy,” he wrote. “But it is not quite as simple as Founders are always great (even if I think it is hard to overstate founders’ value to a startup) and Managers are always bad.”

Hopoo Games, headquartered in Seattle, revealed on Monday that its original founders and “many other” members of its team will now go full-time on internal game projects at Valve.

As a result, Hopoo has ceased production on its current internal project, codenamed “Snail,” and has shut its doors for the time being.

“We love making games – and will continue to do so, for years to come,” the company said on X. “We’re excited to be working side-by-side with the talented people at Valve. But for now – sleep tight, Hopoo Games.”

Hopoo was founded in 2012 by Duncan Drummond and Paul Morse, who were then students at the University of Washington. Their debut project, Risk of Rain, is an action game that challenges players to find a way off of a hostile alien world before they’re overwhelmed by waves of monsters. If the player’s character dies, they must start the game over.

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Risk of Rain was crowdfunded via Kickstarter, created with the GameMaker engine, and debuted on Steam in 2013. It quickly became a sales success, with over three million copies sold by 2019. A remake, Risk of Rain Returns, was released for PC and Nintendo Switch in 2023.

Hopoo went on to create a 2019 sequel, Risk of Rain 2, with the Unity game engine. It subsequently sold the rights to that game to its publishing partner Gearbox Entertainment (Borderlands) in November 2022, while Hopoo Games retained its independence. Gearbox has since continued development on Risk of Rain 2 with multiple expansions, such as the recent Seekers of the Storm.

Neither Valve nor Hopoo Games have revealed what Hopoo is working on at Valve. Right now, Valve’s highest-profile internal project is Deadlock, which pits two teams of six against each other in gameplay that takes elements from both “hero shooters” (i.e. Overwatch) and online battle arenas like Dota 2.

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The cybersecurity breach over Memorial Day weekend affected access to staff and public computers, online catalog and loaning systems, e-books and e-audiobooks, in-building Wi-Fi, the library website, and more.

Over the course of its recovery, SPL gave incremental updates on what services it had restored and what work remained to be completed. Cybersecurity experts also previously weighed in on why the library was a target and what such organizations could do to shore up defenses.

The library said in a statement Tuesday that it is working to conduct an assessment of its response to the attack and will issue a public report later this year. But SPL did reveal to GeekWire some of the steps it has taken to prevent future attacks.

“The work to strengthen our systems began prior to the attack, but remaining items in IT’s work plan were expedited after the attack,” said Laura Gentry, head of communications for the library. “Since Memorial Day weekend, the library expedited migration to SharePoint Online, as well as implementation of multi-factor authentication on staff systems — which took place over the course of three days, rather than the weeks-long process we had planned.”

Gentry said SPL also expanded its use of cloud-based Microsoft tools that it had recently implemented for file management and communication needs. The IT staff also leveraged cloud-based infrastructure capabilities and retired some legacy on-premises services to “build back better” post-attack.

The library also re-imaged approximately 1,000 computers (serving both staff and public), forced password updates systemwide, and strengthened password requirements, according to Gentry.

Jim Alkove, CEO of Seattle-based cybersecurity startup Oleria, commended the library for implementing multi-factor authentication and migrating to cloud-based services, calling both essential moves to restore operations and fortify library systems for the future.

While MFA significantly enhances security, Alkove said it’s most effective when it’s deployed comprehensively and uses strong, phishing-resistant methods like FIDO2 keys and passkeys.

“The other critical aspect of ransomware prevention is patching,” Alkove said. “By transitioning to SaaS and cloud environments, SPL has effectively offloaded the responsibility for patch management of critical server assets to vendors that are typically better resourced to maintain patch compliance.” He added that it reduced the attack surface of legacy on-premises systems, which can be a common target for attackers.

Sunil Gottumukkala, co-founder and CEO of Seattle-based cybersecurity startup Averlon, also lauded the move to MFA for staff. It was something he hoped the library would institute when he spoke to GeekWire shortly after the attack in May.

“In terms of moving to cloud services from Microsoft to ‘build back better’ … while that’s good in general, it may not be relevant in terms of defending against future ransomware attacks,” Gottumukkala said Thursday via email. “They should put in a ‘recover and rebuild’ plan that is periodically tested, which they haven’t mentioned.”

He said lack of preparedness could explain why it took the library so long to recover from the attack, but he cautioned that all the details about where SPL spent its time in the recovery process are not yet known.

Alkove agreed that it’s essential that the library’s security protocols are regularly tested, monitored and maintained. Part of that involves solving persistent challenges around “over-provisioning” — meaning providing just the access and permissions users need and nothing more. Alkove said most organizations grapple with a significant over-provisioned user access — creating “a large attack surface for a bad actor” — and Microsoft reports that 95% of access goes unused.

Alkove said recovery timelines can vary widely between organizations, but true resilience goes beyond just getting systems back online.

“The SPL incident, like the recent Crowdstrike incident, highlights the need for every organization to focus on cyber resilience,” Alkove said. “This is why business continuity planning is so crucial. Organizations must continuously update and test their recovery plans to ensure they can respond swiftly and effectively the next time an attack happens.”

Golden Record 2.0, a project created by students, teachers and researchers affiliated with Avenues: The World School, is also getting an assist from artist Jon Lomberg, who was the design director for Golden Record 1.0.

The original Golden Record project involved preserving imagery and sounds from around the world on gold-plated phonograph records. Copies of the record were placed on NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 probes and launched into space in 1977. The idea was that if space travelers came across the records in the distant future, they could decipher the recorded archive and learn what our world was like in the 20th century.

Golden Record 2.0’s organizers are going after the same idea, even though they’re still looking into how their archive would be packaged and launched.

Project Silica could play a role in the packaging. Richard Black, a manager at Microsoft Research’s Cambridge lab in Britain, has been leading an effort to store data inside thin platters of fused silica glass.

“It does that using ultrashort laser pulses that make a permanent, detectable and yet transparent modification to the glass crystal, so the data ends up as durable as the piece of glass itself,” Black explained in a Microsoft podcast called Collaborators.

Each coaster-sized platter could store several terabytes of data for many millennia, according to Microsoft. The data can be read out using a microscope, and decoded using machine-learning algorithms.

Black and his colleagues encoded a couple of test platters for Golden Record 2.0. They also created a glass-based instruction guide that could help anyone who came across the platters — either aliens or humans from the far future — figure out how to read them. “Obviously, humanity isn’t going to give up on microscopes, but if we can explain to extraterrestrials how they would go about reading a Silica platter, then it should be pretty obvious that we can explain to our human descendants how to do so,” Black said.

Meanwhile, the Golden Record 2.0 team is following the model used by Lomberg and the other creators of the original Golden Record, who digitized images as well as natural sounds, music and spoken words for their archive of humanity.

Back then, the internet was still in its infancy. Today, the 2.0 team is taking advantage of online tools to solicit multimedia contributions and get feedback on the media contributed by others.

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“I like to think of it as sort of a time capsule of humanity that was designed to represent us — who we are as a species, what we love, why we love it, what we do, and our diversity, why we’re all different, why we do different things — to possible extraterrestrials,” said team member Dexter Greene, who’s beginning his freshman year as an engineering student at the University of Michigan.

Lomberg helped Greene and his teammates select and organize the content for the archive. He also filled them in on the story behind the original Golden Record, and the history and fundamentals of interstellar communication.

“People always ask me how I would do the Golden Record differently today,” Lomberg told GeekWire in an email. “I began this project at Avenues as a way of answering that question. Created by high schoolers and the most modern technology, this is a next-generation message to the stars.”

Over the decades, several other projects have styled themselves as successors to the Golden Record project. Lomberg himself was in charge of one of those efforts, which was called the OneEarth Message. More recently, the Arch Mission Foundation has had micro-miniaturized archives sent into space with the aid of partners ranging from SpaceX, Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines to Microsoft and the University of Washington.

The Golden Record 2.0 team hasn’t yet secured a ride to space. However, Greene said he and his teammates have been “talking a bit” with the team behind a similar effort called Humanity’s Message to the Stars (a.k.a. Message in a Bottle). That project is led by Jonathan Jiang, a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Greene said commercial space ventures, including SpaceX, could provide additional options. “We’ve thought about all of that, and we’ve been reaching out to other space agencies,” he said.

Black said the effort is worth taking on even if Golden Record 2.0 never gets to the stars. “I think encouraging humanity to reflect on itself — where we are, the challenges ahead for us as a species here on planet Earth — you know, this is a good time to think those thoughts,” he said.

Greene agreed. “We’ve given a lot of thought to that,” he said. “Even if the record doesn’t reach extraterrestrials, is it worth it? … It’s so worth it, just for us to reflect on where we are, and how we can improve what we’ve done in the past, and what we can do in the future.”

From a newsstand in Harvard Square to a storefront in Albuquerque, N.M., to a burger joint in Bellevue, Wash., and beyond, Microsoft’s rise, fall, and rebound is one of the most colorful and tumultuous stories in business history.

But the next chapter is still unfolding.

That’s the context for a special year-long GeekWire project, launching this fall in advance of the 50th anniversary next year of the company’s April 1975 founding. We’ll be digging through the archives and talking with key figures, past and present, to better understand how Microsoft got here, and where it’s headed next.

This independent GeekWire editorial project is made possible with underwriting support from Accenture.

In addition to a series of stories on GeekWire, the Microsoft @ 50 project will include special episodes of the GeekWire Podcast, and a half-day conference in the first quarter of 2025. We’ll be announcing details for this event soon.

As a reporter who has covered Microsoft for more than 20 of those 50 years, I’m excited about the opportunity to revisit some of the biggest milestones and missteps in its history with fresh eyes, using historical context to shed new light on more recent developments inside the company and across the industry.

We’ll be launching the series in the coming weeks with a look at Microsoft’s roots in artificial intelligence, the pivotal decisions that brought the company to where it is today in AI, and what’s at stake in the years ahead.

Other installments will look closely at the past and future of the company’s biggest franchises, including Xbox and Windows. We’ll also be catching up with some of Microsoft’s best-known alumni to see where they are now.

Thanks for reading, stay tuned for details on the upcoming Microsoft @ 50 event, and check back in the coming weeks for the first story in this special series.