The most ‘Founder Mode’ CEO working today is not actually the founder. NEW EPISODE with Kaz @nejatian of @Opendoor is now live. This is a special one. Kaz left Shopify to pull off the refounding of a struggling public company in just 16 days. Incredible story. Here are just a few of my learnings from our conversation on the latest episode of Long Strange Trip: 1. First Derivative Businesses The most enduring companies are rarely built on their primary activity; they are built on the first derivative of that core business. Great founders identify and weaponize the secondary value stream. This is important. 2. Rejecting Defaults Success is a function of the defaults you choose to overwrite. Most operators accept the 'software' of their industry or life on autopilot; exceptional builders identify the one or two critical defaults and fight them with all their power to create a new trajectory. Kaz is a master at this, and he explains how. 3. Stewardship Over Status Optimize for doing things rather than being things. When a leader optimizes for a title or happiness, they create fragile organizations; when they optimize for stewardship and service, they build a mission-driven culture that can withstand the lonely and painful stretches of the journey. 4. Write a user manual for yourself "Strong attract, strong repel. My job is to tell you what kind of a person I am so you can opt in or opt out." I love this quote. If you're a founder, you owe this to everyone around you. 5. Founder mode = responsibility for outcomes Hold yourself responsible for truth and outcomes, not processes. Hire people to round you out. Don't try to be well-rounded yourself. And don't work on your weaknesses. "Is the fact that I'm bad at this the reason I'm good at everything else?" 6. Structural Risk Mispricing The one permanent advantage for entrepreneurs is that the rest of the world structurally misprices risk. While others see a 'lion bite' in every setback, the best CEOs recognizes that things going poorly is not as painful as you think, allowing them to lean into volatility that scares off the incumbent. That's the difference. 7. Death Spiral Honesty When a company is in a death spiral, incrementalism is fatal; "what must change os everything." Professional managers are often incentivized by RSUs to delay the inevitable and manage a slow decline. You need zero incentive to manage a decline and a compensation structure aligned purely with performance. 8. AI as the New Performance Default Default to AI is not a suggestion; it is the first line of the job description. A company becomes AI-native not through top-down mandates, but by making AI proficiency a core pillar of the performance management system - effectively deciding who gets to play on the team based on their ability to automate their own craft. 9. The Career vs. Job Distinction "A job is something you do for someone else in order to get paid. A career is something you work on every day for yourself." Kaz's kids know what @Opendoor is. His family is all in. Exceptional companies are built by people who self-identify with their work and treat their professional mission as a family-integrated pursuit. 10. Two timeframes matter. Everything else is noise. This week and 10 years from now. "This quarter is a deeply useless measuring period." @tobi applies a discount rate of basically zero to the future. That's the model. My takeaway from this conversation: ask yourself what defaults you're living by that you haven't deliberately chosen. Kaz overrides every default, and he does it over and over again.
