I spend most of my time writing for developers. Deep technical dives into multi-agent orchestration, token optimization strategies, the gritty details of making AI coding tools actually work in production. That’s the HyperDev core audience.
But some of my favorite conversations happen with founders. Non-technical founders, specifically—the ones building companies around technical products they can’t personally inspect. They ask great questions. “Is my CTO building the right thing?” “Are we secure?” “What did the team actually ship last month?”
These questions deserve better answers than “trust your tech lead.”
So I built something for them.
What Founders Mode Does
Claude MPM now includes a dedicated output style I’m calling Founders Mode. Enable it, and every response shifts from technical jargon to plain business English. The underlying analysis stays rigorous. Same codebase scanning, same security checks, same activity tracking. But the explanations land differently.
Here’s what that looks like in practice.
Technical Mode output: “Your authentication module uses bcrypt for password hashing with a cost factor of 12. JWT tokens are signed using RS256 with a 15-minute expiration.”
Founders Mode output: “Your login system is secure. Passwords are scrambled in a way that makes them nearly impossible to crack (industry standard). Login sessions expire after 15 minutes of inactivity for security.”
Same analysis. Different delivery. The founder learns what matters: the system is secure, sessions timeout appropriately. No need to understand bcrypt cost factors or RS256 signing algorithms.
I’m Not Encouraging Vibe Coding
Let me be clear about what this isn’t.
I’m not trying to turn founders into vibe coders. If you want to spin up an app by chatting with AI, there are better tools for that. Bolt, Lovable, Replit Agent—they’re designed for that workflow. Claude Code and Claude MPM? Overkill for prototyping. These are sophisticated development environments built for rigorous programming. Using them for quick prototypes is like hiring a structural engineer to hang a picture frame.
What Claude MPM does exceptionally well is analyze existing codebases. Point it at a repository—yours, your team’s, a potential acquisition target—and ask questions in plain English. It’ll crawl the code, understand the architecture, and give you answers you can actually use.
I do this daily. Not for coding. For understanding.
Questions Founders Should Be Asking
The documentation includes a full question bank, but let me share the ones I find most valuable:
Security (the question that keeps founders up at night):
“Are there any security vulnerabilities in our code?”
“Show me how user passwords are stored. Is this secure?”
Team visibility (what actually happened this sprint):
“Show me what the team worked on this week”
“Who’s working on what right now?”
Technical risk (before your next board meeting):
“Give me a health check of our codebase”
“What technical debt do we have? Should I be worried?”
Planning sanity checks:
“We want to add [feature]. How big of a project is this?”
“Can our system handle 10x more users?”
That last one matters more than most founders realize. I’ve seen technical due diligence kill acquisitions because nobody asked until the term sheet was signed.
Why I Built This
Call it a gift to some of my favorite people.
Founders operate with incomplete information by definition. They hire technical talent they can’t directly evaluate. They approve roadmaps they can’t fully validate. They trust their teams—as they should—but trust without verification creates blind spots.
Most technical visibility tools require technical expertise to interpret. Dashboards full of metrics that mean nothing without context. Reports that assume you know what “cyclomatic complexity” means.
Founders Mode strips that assumption away. Ask a question, get an answer in business terms. If something’s genuinely complex, it’ll tell you that too. But it won’t hide behind jargon.
How to Enable It
Two options.
Option 1: Command Palette In Claude Code, press Ctrl+Shift+P (Windows/Linux) or Cmd+Shift+P (Mac). Type “output style” and select “Claude MPM Founders” from the dropdown.
Option 2: Just Ask Tell Claude: “Switch to Founders Mode. From now on, explain everything in business terms, not technical jargon.”
Both work. The Command Palette approach persists across sessions.
The Limitations (Because Everything Has Them)
Founders Mode explains things simply. It doesn’t make complex things simple.
Some technical decisions require technical judgment. Architecture choices. Framework selection. Security trade-offs that depend on your specific threat model. Founders Mode will help you understand the stakes, but it won’t replace your CTO’s expertise.
Think of it as a translation layer, not a decision engine. It helps you ask better questions and understand the answers. The decisions remain yours.
Getting Started
If you’re already running Claude MPM, enable Founders Mode and point it at your codebase. Start with “Give me a health check.” Good first question that surfaces the big picture.
If you’re new to Claude MPM entirely, the Absolute Beginner’s Guide walks through installation in about ten minutes. No programming required. You’ll need a Claude subscription (Max recommended for regular use) and your GitHub repository URL. That’s it.
I’ve included a glossary of technical terms you’ll encounter: repository, commit, pull request, technical debt. All explained in plain English.
The Bigger Picture
I write a lot about AI tools replacing developer tasks. Orchestration systems that coordinate multiple agents. Token optimization that squeezes more capability from every API call. The cutting edge of what’s possible.
This isn’t that.
Founders Mode is a simple feature built for a specific audience with a specific need: non-technical leaders who want to understand their technical investments without becoming engineers themselves.
Sometimes the most valuable tools aren’t the most sophisticated ones. They’re the ones that meet people where they are.
I’m Bob Matsuoka, writing about agentic coding and AI-powered development at HyperDev. For more on Claude MPM’s capabilities, read my deep dive into multi-agent orchestration or my analysis of the Claude Code ecosystem.