Founder Agency.
Scaling Without Losing Yourself or Your Team.
Dear Fellow Founder,
I see you.
The sleepless nights, endless redirection, and the weight of responsibility. And also, that fire that keeps you going. The spark that ignites your passion, vision, and perhaps, the need to create something that transcends yourself.
That fire? It’s both the essence of our work and the most dangerous thing we carry.
I am on your same wavelength.
Building something bigger than ourselves can leave us teetering between two states: Founder Mode and Founder Syndrome.
In Founder Mode, we’re at the height of our creative potential, able to envision the future and bring others along for the ride. This is the state where imagination flows freely, where we align the pieces of human capacity, innovation, and growth.
But then, without heads up, it’s easy to slide into Founder Syndrome. A phase where our vision becomes a trap. It happens when we can no longer see beyond the boundaries of our own identity, when the company starts to feel like an extension of our ego rather than a living, breathing organism that requires input, challenge, and change to grow.
These two states are a fundamental human tension in scaling, and where Founder Agency must rise.
It’s not just about our ability to lead or scale. It’s about a deeper reckoning:
Can we keep the fire of our vision alive without burning everything (and everyone) else in the process?
Introducing Founder Agency
From former U.N. Ambassador and National Security Advisor, Susan E. Rice, the world learned this:
“Progress is the product of human agency. Things get better because we make them better. Things go wrong when we get too comfortable, when we fail to take risks or seize opportunities.”
A founder’s ability to consciously shape and direct both the growth of their company and the development of their people, in alignment with humanity-centered principles, it’s what I define as: Founder Agency.
It’s about making deliberate, thoughtful decisions that prioritize long-term organizational self-reliance, human dignity, and integrity over short-term gains, while maintaining the freedom and responsibility to lead without being consumed by the demands of hypergrowth.
Founder Agency is about using your power and autonomy to guide the company’s direction and culture in a way that reflects both your vision and the flourishing of those who build the company alongside you.
Why Founder Agency Matters Now More Than Ever
Founder Agency begins with understanding that our companies are more than machines. They are ecosystems of relationships.
Just as any organism requires certain conditions to thrive, so too do organizations. Founders who recognize this truth don’t just scale products or services, they scale people. Acceleration, capturing markets, scaling profits will never override this essential truth: Companies are made up of humans. Each carrying their own dreams and fears, also anchoring in the cornerstones of human life that bring about Survival, Connection and Generativity.
We must be the ones to remind our teams, investors, and customers that the metrics on the spreadsheet, while important, are only one dimension of success. The deeper success comes from the quality of the human experience within that scaling trajectory. In the push for hypergrowth, founders are often encouraged to put their heads down and scale at all costs. But at what cost? Burnout, broken cultures, lost innovation, for starters.
We need a new narrative for success, one that prioritizes the health of the company alongside the health of the people who build it.
Founder Agency in Humanistic Scaling
When we reclaim our agency as founders, we also reclaim our responsibility to scale with integrity. Investors, VCs, and the market should not see this as a trade-off. Quite the opposite. A company that scales humanistically is more resilient, more innovative, and more capable of weathering the inevitable storms of hypergrowth.
It’s time to move from Founder Mode to Founder Agency.
It’s time to lead with the understanding that our companies are living entities, not extensions of our egos. And it’s time to invite investors and VCs into a new conversation: one where we aren’t just asked how fast we can grow, but how deeply we can impact the human lives that make that growth possible. Instead of asking, “How much more can we get out of this team?” we should be asking, “How can we help them become more?”
Humanistic scaling is about aligning the growth of the business with the growth of the people within it. When our teams feel seen, heard, and valued, they bring more of themselves to the work. They innovate more, they care more, and they give more. This isn’t about soft leadership. It’s about creating the conditions for exponential human expansion.
Because when people grow, so does the business.
About the author:
Dr. Lindsay Ruiz, EdD is the Founder and CEO of human as usual | scaling generatively, advancing humankind
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindsayruiz/ Visit our website: www.humanasusual.com