Founder mode in the AI era: Hands-on technical leadership and winning in crowded markets

It’s the classic Silicon Valley test of conviction: you have an idea, you pitch it to operators and VCs, and they tell you it’s completely unnecessary.

For Adar Arnon and his co-founder at SafeBase (recently acquired by Drata), that “stupid idea” was the Trust Center—a product that solved the friction of enterprise security reviews. While everyone else was building automated SOC 2 compliance tools, they noticed a critical gap. Fixing that gap ultimately led to a massive exit.

In a recent conversation, Adar broke down what it actually means to operate in Founder Mode these days, how AI is changing engineering leadership, and why you your technical culture matters more than ever before.

Here are the biggest takeaways for technical founders and engineering leaders.

1. Find Greenfield in a Bloodbath

When SafeBase was coming out of Y Combinator, the automated compliance market (companies like Vanta and Drata) was already exploding. The conventional wisdom for a cybersecurity founder would be to build a better, faster SOC 2 tool.

Adar’s team realized the party had already started, and they didn’t want to fight in a bloodbath for SMB market share.

Instead of asking, *“How do we compete?”* they went to users and asked, *“What does your current SOC 2 tool NOT solve?”*

The answer was enterprise deal friction. When companies scale, security knowledge becomes siloed between sales, security, and engineering. Closing a big enterprise deal meant navigating an endless maze of security questionnaires. SafeBase built Trust Centers to solve this specific, hair-on-fire problem for mid-market and enterprise companies, completely bypassing the crowded SMB dogfight.

The Takeaway: If everyone agrees your idea is the top problem to solve today, you’re already late to the party. Find the unsexy, high-friction problem that the current “winners” are ignoring.

2. The Holy Grail: Enterprise Viral Loops

Product-Led Growth (PLG) is usually reserved for consumer apps or bottom-up developer tools. It rarely happens in enterprise B2B sales.