Cross-disipline

Get Your Hands Dirty: The Hidden Superpower of Founder Mode

Founder Mode emphasizes hands-on leadership and team alignment. Insights will be shared on innovation, growth, and management balance.

Daniel Chaibi

Daniel Chaibi

Daniels passion is to create great user experiences that truly makes a difference! The challenge is often to make things simple, yet powerful. When you find that balance, that sweet spot, magic happens. He has close to 20 years of experience in product development and team build-up, covering multiple roles and domains. He has extensive experience in building and scaling teams, local, remote and hybrid.

Daniel has been part of all stages of product development, delivering to web, desktop, mobile and even custom built hardware. Users have been both enterprise and consumer, and in most cases; business critical applications. He is currently Chief Product and Technology Officer at Foodback. Read more about his current responsibilities here: https://www.foodback.com/development-innovation/.

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I started my career as a consultant, in a big company with traditional management structure. It felt safe and good, I learned a lot, but very often I got frustrated when things did not move as fast as I wanted. Since then, I moved to smaller and smaller companies, getting closer and closer to the product, and now I’m in the epicentre of an international scale-up with only 10-15 FTEs. And i love it!

The scale-up I’m referring to is Foodback, where I joined as a Co-Founder and CPTO in 2016. At HelloStavanger 2024, I shared the story of our journey in the session “Scaling from Ålgård to North America and Beyond”, which showed what a roller-coaster ride we have been through so far.

I would never have lasted this long (9 years!), had it not been for the love of the product, company and most of all, the people. Talking to people about our journey, descriptions that often come up are “grit!”, “you guys seem so determined”, “what a persistence”. I have not thought much about it, just done my part, kept the ship afloat and moved forward. Then in 2024, Paul Graham, the Co-Founder of Y Combinator wrote an essay which summarised it all in one term: Founder Mode.

In my opinion, if you don’t get your hands dirty, you’ll only ever clean up after others. True management is built with muddy hands, not clean gloves.

In this session, I will take you through what Founder Mode is for me, for Foodback, and how it has enabled us to get where we are today. All logic would point towards Foodback being bankrupt long time ago, but with a common vision, aligned team and management with dirty hands, we have stayed in the game, now at the brink of international break through.

In this session, Daniel will discuss:

  • The Journey: How I’ve led the product development from the front, ensuring alignment with the company's vision.
  • Hands-On Leadership: The benefits and challenges of being involved in day-to-day operations and decision-making processes.
  • Taking chances: How you some times need to gamble without knowing how things might end up.
  • Innovation and Growth: How founder mode has contributed to innovation and growth within the company.
  • Balancing Act: Strategies for balancing hands-on involvement with scalable management practices as the company grows.

Whether you're a startup founder, a tech leader, or an aspiring entrepreneur, this talk will hopefully provide some valuable insights into the dynamics of Founder Mode and how it can be a catalyst for success in the tech world. Join if you want to learn from Daniel's experiences and discover how you can harness the power of Founder Mode in your own journey.