founder-mindset

founder-mindset is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from deciqAI/knowledge-skills. It costs 143 tokens per session (2,284 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A decision framework for running an early-stage company under uncertainty. It focuses on checking whether the company can survive financially and on doing practical work before building systems that do not yet fit.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for cash-runway decisions, hiring plans, company pivots, fundraising, workload bottlenecks, and hard tasks that keep being delayed.
Why use it?
It helps founders decide about hiring, firing, raising money, cutting spending, or changing direction before comfort and premature scaling hide serious problems.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it for cash-runway decisions, hiring plans, company pivots, fundraising, workload bottlenecks, and hard tasks that keep being delayed.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/founder-mindset
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add deciqAI/knowledge-skills --skill founder-mindset
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/deciqAI/knowledge-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for founder-mindset

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/founder-mindset/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/founder-mindset)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/founder-mindset"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/founder-mindset/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for founder-mindset

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/founder-mindset"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/founder-mindset.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 143 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,284 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00143 $0.02284
Opus 5 $0.00072 $0.01142
Sonnet 5 $0.00029 $0.00457
Haiku 4.5 $0.00014 $0.00228

Measured 9d ago against content hash 35b97f85a411, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

founder-mindset scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

founder-mindset/SKILL.md · 123 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 123 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Founder Mindset

Overview

A specific cognitive mode for running an early-stage company — different from manager mindset (optimizing known systems) and employee mindset (executing within fixed scope). Founders search for the system itself under conditions of extreme uncertainty, asymmetric risk, and personal execution bottlenecks. The two load-bearing disciplines: Default Alive or Default Dead (Graham 2015) and doing things that don't scale (Graham 2013).

Compose: first-principles on inherited assumptions about how companies operate · regret-minimization for the decision to start or quit · inversion to surface failure paths founders underweight · lean-startup + mvp operationally · metacognition to catch monitoring lapses under founder stress.

When to Use

Apply when: running an early-stage company (hire/fire/pivot/raise/cut burn decisions) · comfort-seeking is creeping in · cannot tell if on path to success or slow death · team is scaling prematurely · a specific hard problem has been on the list > 2 weeks · deciding how much to raise/burn/hire amid the AI-startup gold rush (abundant capital, AI bubble talk, tiny high-agency teams) · someone says "founder mindset," "founder mode," "default alive or default dead," "do things that don't scale," "am I avoiding the hard thing?"

When NOT to use: mature well-understood business · employee within a startup · purely tactical decision · "founder mindset" as performative identity.

Coaching Novices (Adaptive Front Door)

  • Engine mode: user has a specific founder-mode decision → run the Founder-Mode Audit directly.
  • Coach mode: vague situation or unfamiliarity → guide step by step.

In Coach mode, respond one step at a time. Each [WAIT] is a hard stop — output only that step's question, then stop.

  1. What-it-is. Founder mindset = running an early-stage company under extreme uncertainty. Two hardest moves: (a) doing things that don't scale, (b) asking Default Alive or Default Dead early enough to act.
  2. Check fit. Mature business → manager frameworks. Employee scope → most doesn't transfer. Tactical decision → too small.
  3. Elicit the specific situation. "I'm a founder" is too vague — need a specific decision or pattern.

[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]

  1. Run The Process one step at a time with their input.

[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]

  1. Close by naming the one founder-mode move they have been avoiding.

[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]

Read the full file on GitHub · 123 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 123 lines · 143 tokens per session scan A 35b97f85a411

Subscribe to this mod's changes

founder-mindset is a skill published in the GitHub repository deciqAI/knowledge-skills (10 stars, last pushed 10d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 143 tokens to every session and 2,284 once invoked, about $0.0007 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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