… And for any new readers, welcome to Signal // Noise — the newsletter read by CEOs, founders, & scrappy builders every Thursday. Each week, what I’m listening to, one deep dive, notes from the field, three links worth your time. No buzz, no bullshit.

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Last week we named a tension that could be holding you back, and this week's the operating model that can hopefully help you hold that tension, better.

As such, we gotta talk about Founder Mode.

Paul Graham's 2024 essay was about staying close to the work and refusing the professional-manager default. It was a good read, a timely argument.

The essay was sparked by Brian Chesky giving a talk at YC about how Airbnb almost died. Chesky had taken the standard advice (hire senior professionals, let them run things) and watched the professionals run his company into the ground while telling him they had it under control.

Graham's takeaway: founders shouldn't outsource their instincts to a manager class.

That was the message, which then got hijacked.

Eighteen months later, "Founder Mode" is mostly being used to justify being an a**hole.

I see people using it as cover for behavior they always wanted to indulge in.

Abrasiveness got rebranded as intensity, being a hardass as discipline.

And the loudest voices in the conversation treat "be rough" like it's the same thing as "run a tight ship."

But it's not.

Let’s come back briefly to the Graham Duncan piece (yes, the same Duncan from last week).

He profiled David Tepper, arguably one of the most brilliant hedge fund managers of the last 30 years. Duncan's read was that the trait that makes Tepper great isn't aggression, it's that he holds both aggression and humility at the same time.

Not just in balance, but in a range.

He can be sharp in a meeting and self-effacing two minutes later, and neither one's performance.

That's what I think Founder Mode was actually pointing at, the range.

That’s what I think got lost.

So here's my operating model that I think reflects the range.

I've been refining it for a decade, and I call it the 3H:

The trick isn't picking which H you favor; the trick is refusing to drop any of them.

Most founders I know or work with have one strong H, maybe one middling H, and then they decide to just let an entire H slip by the wayside.

High expectations plus low support? Your A-players churn out and you call it "raising the bar." Low employee retention and lower morale.

High support plus low transparency? Nobody knows where they stand, so they drift, and you wonder why nothing ships.

High expectations plus low transparency? Fear culture dressed up as performance culture.

Most $500K to $20M founders are stuck between two camps of advisors.

One says be tough, be harsh, this startup stuff ain’t for the faint of heart; the other says be more empathetic, the game has changed, you gotta coddle kids these days!

Neither is the answer. Those options both suck.

The real answer is hold all three Hs and stop trying to pick.

Here's a thing to try over the next 30 days.

For every direct report, score yourself 1 to 3 on each H. Be honest. Then look at the lowest score for each person.

That's a gap worth exploring.

This week's Signal compresses the 3H framework I've spent a decade refining. For the long version, Nick Berry and I went deep on it on the Business Owner's Journey podcast. We get into where founders typically let one H slip, and the practical tells you're holding all three.

Brandon Smithwrick walks through his entire content repurposing engine. If you're a founder trying to push more content out without hiring a team, this is a highly replicable system. Specific, tactical, easy to steal from.

The original framing of "productivity theater" is sharp on its own: looking busy versus being useful. But as a founder, you need to be even more astute now because of what AI can do to this phenomenon. When anyone can spin up a polished memo in 90 seconds or act like an expert, you need to make sure your best people are making decisions and judgements, and the junior AI-everything peeps are executing on volume, not taste.

Ted Turner died last week, which made me think back to reading his autobiography Call Me Ted. It's biz bio meets adventure, and the freaking man lived ten lives. There are parts of Turner I don't fully align with, but for anyone whose guilty pleasure is business memoirs, this one's hard to beat.

Building the 3H operating model in your company takes reps, and it’s even harder if your direct reports are young and inexperienced.

That’s why I'm running leadership sprints for founders right now if you want to level up, for both you and your team.

Have a great weekend, and until next time, thanks for reading.

Jordan