Thoughtly co-founder Casey Mackrell had a big week. First, he got married. Then, he went viral.
At his wedding reception, Mackrell needed to quickly give a colleague access to code that could only be unblocked from his laptop. His fellow co-founder Torrey Leonard seized the moment by taking a photo to capture Mackrell wrapping up a pull request, staring at his computer in a ballroom as his friends and family danced in the background, floral arrangements and fairy lights abound.
Leonard posted the photo of his co-founder on LinkedIn with a reverent caption. The image of a founder coding at his own wedding went viral, sparking both awe and outrage.
Some commenters declared that they would never work with Thoughtly, since the image proved that the founders can’t delegate; others said that Mackrell’s wife should file for an annulment. But the actual story behind the image isn’t as bad as it seems.
“In this very moment that the picture was taken, Casey needed to push one thing to a server. There was a code on his laptop that a colleague needed to access,” Leonard told TechCrunch. “For 30 seconds, Casey was clicking a button: He logged in, clicked a button, done. And you can see in the picture, too, people are laughing.”
Leonard doesn’t provide the context that Mackrell was on his computer for less than one minute. But that’s what made his post so clicky: The idea of a founder spending hours coding at his own wedding is maddening. What actually happened isn’t as heinous.
Leonard’s post generated so much discussion in the startup community because it’s an extension of the existing discourse around “founder mode,” a concept coined by Paul Graham, a founding partner of Y Combinator. And beyond Silicon Valley, the post made for great rage bait.
“Last year, we would spend time in SF, and I’d be talking to friends at a restaurant or a bar, and there Casey would be on his laptop — and other people as well, because it’s SF, right?” said Leonard. “This founder mode mentality, it’s very inspiring to I think a lot of people in the tech space.”
But beyond the tech bubble, what founders view as dedication can be considered a lack of work-life balance.
According to Graham, you can run a company in one of two ways: in founder mode, or in manager mode. In founder mode, the founder should be hands-on with everything the company does. Founders transition into manager mode when they start delegating, which Graham argues can make a startup less successful.
Both Graham’s essay and Leonard’s LinkedIn post were met with mixed feedback. While some found Mackrell’s embodiment of “founder mode” to be motivational, others were appalled at this lack of work-life balance.
“Publicly, all of the comments that we’ve received are super negative … We were on 4chan, we were on Reddit, and obviously, people who represent communities outside of tech just, frankly, didn’t like it,” Leonard said.
Viral LinkedIn posts, which range from satirical to delusional, usually end up on other platforms, divorced from their context. One particularly successful post, in which a founder declares what proposing to his fiance taught him about b2b sales, was posted as a joke, though the post has blown up into a new meme in its own right.
Dozens of commenters said that Mackrell’s wife should immediately annul their marriage; other people said that they would avoid working with Thoughtly because they disagree with what working at a wedding represents.
“Meanwhile, I’ve received at this point thousands of emails, LinkedIn DMs, texts from founders that I know, unicorn founders that I don’t know, Fortune 500 CEOs, and the top investors in the world across Silicon Valley that have said, ‘Let’s go, I’m on your side,’” Leonard said.
Mackrell is now on his honeymoon with his wife, so he couldn’t be reached for comment. But his wife wasn’t bothered by her husband pulling out his laptop at their wedding, according to Leonard. Still, the company should probably figure out how to avoid a situation like this in the future, where only one person in a company of 15 employees can solve a particular problem. Paul Graham would probably disagree, though.