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Founder’s Mentality: The Scalable Alternative to Heroics

Thursday, November 6, 2025 · 4–7 PM PST

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About this session

Much has been written recently about the trade-offs between running a startup in “Founder Mode” an intense, hands-on operating style, compared to shifting into “Manager Mode” to enable rapid scale. While both approaches have their place, I believe there’s a more effective path - ensuring the company’s culture is grounded in a Founder’s Mentality.


Drawing on lessons from my time at founder-led companies, including: Sun Microsystems, Amazon, Airbnb, and WheelsUp, we’ll explore how embedding a Founder’s Mentality can offer a more durable, scalable, and energizing alternative, while avoiding some of the more common mistakes that occur while scaling a company.

The challenge is to preserve the urgency, vision and front-line obsession of the founder, combined with demanding the discipline and repeatability of a high-functioning operating system. This approach supports long-term sustainable growth.

The session will introduce key principles of what it means to build with a Founder’s Mentality and set the stage for our breakout discussions on how to scale teams, process and culture.

Agenda

  1. 8–8:30 AM PST

    Arrive and Check in

    Connect with fellow attendees before the event kicks off—arrive on time to make valuable connections and start building relationships that could accelerate your founder journey.

  2. 8:30–9:15 AM PST

    Speaker: Greg Greeley

    Much has been written recently about the trade-offs between running a startup in “Founder Mode” an intense, hands-on operating style, compared to shifting into “Manager Mode” to enable rapid scale. While both approaches have their place, I believe there’s a more effective path - ensuring the company’s culture is grounded in a Founder’s Mentality.

Greg Greeley

Hosting this session

Greg Greeley

CEO at Simon & Schuster

Greg Greeley has spent over 30 years in global leadership roles across industries including e-commerce, aerospace, hospitality, and biotech. He served as the President of Airbnb and has held senior executive positions at Amazon, and Sun Microsystems during their rapid growth phases. During his tenure at each company he led the launch of multiple new business initiatives, and oversaw the acquisition of 14 founder-led companies.
Greg subsequently served as President of Opentrons (a robotics, genome engineering and diagnostics startup), helping grow the company from $100M to unicorn status during a two-year period of hyper-growth, while also advising WheelsUp during its IPO. Most recently, he was CEO of Thrasio leading a major restructuring and transformation effort.

Today, Greg works with Tapas Capital and TCV, advising early-stage and growth-stage founders that are building disruptive companies.

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