A startup usually begins with a founder – someone with a novel idea who decides to build a company around it. However, the role of the founder doesn’t necessarily end when the company takes off.

Many successful startups bring on additional “re-founders” later on.

So what exactly is a re-founder? Here’s how I think about it.

Re-founders Keep the Company Mission-Focused

When a startup first launches, the mission is clear in the founder’s mind. They know exactly why they’re building their particular product.

But as the company grows, that clarity of mission often gets diluted.

Employees have their own interpretations. Departments fracture into mini-fiefdoms, each with its own goals. The org chart starts looking like a bowl of spaghetti.

Without constant gardening, the founding mission gets buried under newer priorities – expansion, profits, and beating the competition. Things that make sense for a mature company but distract from why it exists in the first place.

That’s why startups need re-founders.

A re-founder serves as a guardian of the company’s mission. They keep the org focused on the north star metric that matters, even if it’s currently out of vogue.

Re-founders Revitalize Culture

Early-stage startups generally have a distinctive culture that maps to the founder’s personality. Scrappy, irreverent, ruthless – whatever it takes to survive.

But as startups scale, newer employees join without knowing or caring much about those early days. The unique startup culture gets swamped by generic corporate values imported from outside.

Re-founders excavate the original culture and replant it firmly at the core of a scaled-up company. They highlight legacy heroes and refresh old rituals with a modern twist. Anything to preserve the startup’s essence even with 10x more employees.

Re-founders Redesign Systems

In the early hustling period, startups accumulate messy systems and processes that barely work but focus everyone on quick growth.

As companies mature though, those duct-taped systems crumble under their own weight. However, employees resist change, not wanting to slow down. They cargo-cult old behaviors that no longer make sense.

Re-founders ruthlessly upgrade systems for the next stage of growth. They compost what isn’t working and plant seeds for a refreshed architecture. It’s thankless but essential replumbing.

Re-founders Can Be Founders Themselves

The most obvious re-founders are actually founders, usually the second CEO after the initial founder steps back.

Larry Page re-founded Google by realigning the company around big bets like Android and Google Brain. Satya Nadella re-founded Microsoft around platforms and communities.

But re-founders can also be early employees who step up to revitalize a company they helped build. Sheryl Sandberg re-founded Facebook as a mobile ads giant. Sundar Pichai re-founded Google as an AI-first company.

The key quality in both cases is seeing present-day problems with the clarity of an outsider but seizing solutions with the leverage of the ultimate insider.

When Do Startups Need Re-founders?

Startups don’t stay young and feisty forever. If they survive, they’ll inevitably need a re-founder or three.

Here are three telltale signs that your fast-growing startup has reached prime re-founding territory:

Mission Creep

Do most employees see the mission purely through the lens of their own department’s goals? Do they know the company’s true North Star metric? If not, fuzzy misalignment will only compound.

Time to call in a strong re-founder to realign everyone behind the core mission. They’ll highlight cross-departmental connections and prune distracting vanity metrics. A re-founded mission creates focused employees.

Cultural Atrophy

As the startup expands, do new hires ever ask about or discuss the company’s origin story? If not, the unique early-stage culture is getting suffocated under scale.

That’s when you need a re-founder to step up, document the culture, reinforce it through training, and most importantly – embody it themselves. Culture can’t be archived, it must be embodied daily.

Dysfunctional Systems

Is the startup accumulating technical debt across its software, tools, and processes under pressure to ship features? Are employees hacking inefficient workarounds? Then systems need re-founding.

A courageous re-founder in this situation sweeps away the mess to build a resilient platform for future innovation. They care more about constructive refinement than immediate returns. But re-founded systems pay long-term dividends.

Can Any Founder Be A Re-founder?

We often imagine the iconic founder as a permanent force within their startup. Like a general leading troops through battle after battle.

But not every founder makes a great re-founder. In fact re-founding requires a fundamentally different mindset.

Here are three shifts founders need to make to be truly great re-founders:

From Brave Leader To Humble Learner

The classic founder charges ahead driven by burning conviction. They rarely second-guess big visions. And they rally the troops with charismatic confidence.

However re-founders adopt the posture of a learner rather than a knowing leader. They ask probing questions and synthesize conflicting perspectives without rushing to judge.

A re-founder knows servant leadership trumps command and control.

From Sole Owner To Equal Partner

Early employees literalize the founder’s vision into reality like loyal instruments. Founders rightfully own all key decisions and harvest the rewards.

But re-founders transition power to partners and stakeholders. They cultivate leadership within the organization by mentoring, promoting, and rewarding initiative. A mature org shaped by re-founders thinks less about pleasing the leader and more about advancing the mission.

From Inventor To Curator

Founders fall in love with their own ideas. The emotional rush of inventing sustains them through brutal startup phases trading imagination for reality.

Re-founders though curate progress over perfection. They shine a light on the most promising sprouts from employees and fertilize those seedlings. As a curator, the re-founder’s job isn’t to conceive but to reveal innovation bubbling under.

If a founder evolves across these dimensions, their startup will flourish under re-founded leadership.

How LinkedIn Got Re-founded

As a co-founder of LinkedIn, I’ve been fortunate to witness re-founding wisdom in action from some of the best tech leaders.

Jeff Weiner’s long tenure as CEO has been one of constant re-founding despite LinkedIn already dominating its category when he joined.

Here are three under-appreciated ways Jeff re-founded LinkedIn over the past decade:

Values-Based Culture

Many tech CEOs talk generically about “culture” as an abstract asset divorced from daily choices. But Jeff embedded culture through a set of operational values that guide all decisions at LinkedIn.

Values like “Relationships Matter” and “Take Intelligent Risks” aren’t fluffy taglines. Jeff has shaped a values-literate workforce that references them as a decision-making shorthand. That cultural vocabulary steers Linkedin as wisely at scale as our small founding team once did through raw intuition.

Flexible Long Term Roadmaps

Unlike founders chasing hot trends, re-founders take the long view. Despite constant market pressure to optimize short term profits, Jeff developed multi-year strategic roadmaps to track progress across all parts of LinkedIn’s complex business.

But he also leaves room to improvise based on what we’re learning. Jeff’s long term roadmaps create alignment without overplanning. They’re guiding rails, not prison bars along LinkedIn’s re-founding journey.

Talent Mobility Programs

Most big companies develop specialists dug into narrow functional silos. However, re-founders know that adaptability and collaboration across disciplines are the lifeblood of startups.

That’s why Jeff championed talent mobility programs like rotations where employees shift roles every few years. Rotations develop well-rounded, values-aligned leaders with networks across the company to drive re-founding priorities forward.

There are dozens more examples like this where Jeff has artfully re-founded LinkedIn over the years. Of course, no CEO can singlehandedly re-found a company that employs thousands, alone.

The Best Re-founders Don’t Go It Alone

While re-founding ultimately flows from the top, it can’t simply be mandated from the C-suite. Real re-founding is participatory. It reveals opportunities trapped under hierarchy and asks, “How can we realize these together?”

In that spirit, here are three parting suggestions if you want to help re-found your company right where you sit today:

Connect Unconnected Coworkers

Who around you seems to have untapped potential beyond their current scope? Introduce them to someone in a different division. Bonding across silos often sparks fresh thinking.

Improve Systems Incrementally

What tool or process do you rely on that falls short? Think through how it could work better and propose tweaks, not a radical overhaul. Small thoughtful changes compound.

Document Tribal Knowledge

What wisdom do old timers discuss informally that new hires miss? Write it down, share slides, or offer to onboard people proactively. Codified culture gets revived.

Companies thrive when re-founding is distributed work shouldered by many, not a burden heroically carried by one anointed leader.

So be the re-founder you want to see in the company. The startup you save might be your own!