The Re-Founder’s Mindset: How Great Companies Reinvent to Stay Ahead

Will what made your company successful still make it successful 10 years from now?

Every company reaches a point where yesterday’s success formula becomes tomorrow’s bottleneck. Strategies that once worked may now hold you back. When this moment arrives, companies must pause, reconnect with their core purpose, and ask: Why do we exist?

The Re-Founder's Mindset

Re-founders are leaders who step into an existing company and drive a fundamental reinvention of its strategy, culture, and ways of working while staying true to its mission. Instead of maintaining the status quo, re-founders rethink core advantages, redesign how the company operates and competes, and place bold bets on new areas while ensuring the mission and culture remain intact and adaptable to a changing world.

I first heard the concept of re-founding from Reid Hoffman—the idea that at critical business and industry inflection points, companies need re-founders to ground them back to their core purpose before the business can transform and pursue something new and bold.

Consider Microsoft in 2014. The company wasn’t failing, but it was stagnating. It had missed the mobile wave, was losing cloud market share, and was internally siloed. Microsoft was playing a game it had already won while the market moved elsewhere.

Then Satya Nadella took over. He re-founded Microsoft by:

• Refocusing on Microsoft’s Original Purpose: Shifting Microsoft’s mindset from competing everywhere to focusing on its original purpose—building tools that empower others to build technology. Satya grounded the company in its roots, reminding the organization that Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen as a tools company to create the BASIC interpreter for the Altair. By realigning with this mission, Microsoft refocused on enabling developers and businesses through tools and infrastructure, which became a key driver of its resurgence. To clarify this purpose internally and externally, he reframed it with a simple message: “If you want to be cool, go join someone else. But if you want to make others cool, join Microsoft."

• Exiting Unwinnable Markets: Nadella made the tough call to shut down Microsoft’s failing Nokia mobile phone business, recognizing that the company had no clear path to leadership in mobile. Instead, he shifted focus to areas with long-term competitive advantage.

• Committing to Cloud Leadership: Microsoft had long been a desktop-first company, but Nadella recognized that its future was in cloud infrastructure, not just software. He made cloud computing a top priority, investing heavily in Azure to compete with AWS.

• Breaking Down Internal Silos: Microsoft’s culture had become fragmented, with divisions operating in isolation. Nadella fostered a more open and collaborative culture, breaking down fiefdoms and encouraging cross-team innovation.

• Betting Big on AI: Seeing AI as the next growth frontier for the industry, Nadella made bold investments in AI research and integration across Microsoft’s products. He led Microsoft to form a deep partnership with OpenAI, investing billions to integrate AI into Azure, Bing, and Office. In a major and surprising move, Microsoft also hired Mustafa Suleyman, cofounder of $4 billion AI startup Inflection, to run its AI operations, along with cofounder Karén Simonyan and key team members. These strategic moves ensured Microsoft would not only compete but lead in the next major wave of technology.

Knowing What to Preserve & What to Change

The hardest part of re-founding isn’t deciding what to change. It’s deciding what to keep.

Tim Cook didn’t try to be Steve Jobs. He knew Apple’s obsession with design and customer experience was non-negotiable. But he also saw that Apple couldn’t rely on hardware alone. Under his leadership, Apple expanded into services, financial products, and custom silicon, creating a more expansive and powerful technology ecosystem. He preserved Apple’s soul while scaling its ambitions.

Dara Khosrowshahi faced a different challenge at Uber. The company had an aggressive, high-growth culture that won regulatory battles—but also created massive dysfunction. Instead of imposing change from the top, he crowdsourced new company values from employees, keeping Uber’s competitive drive while eliminating toxicity.

A refounder doesn’t erase the past. They refine it. They protect what makes a company great while eliminating what holds it back.

Re-Founding Is a Bet on the Future

Re-founding isn’t about just making a company more efficient. It’s about making the company stronger and more competitive to win existing and new markets all while making the right moves before they seem obvious.

Andy Jassy took over as Amazon’s CEO in 2021 after decades of hypergrowth under Jeff Bezos. His challenge was different. Amazon had become so large that reinvention, not expansion, was its biggest need.

Jassy’s leadership marks a re-founding moment in three ways:

• Rebalancing Amazon’s Growth Strategy: Under Bezos, Amazon was in aggressive expansion mode. Jassy shifted focus to profitable growth, cutting underperforming areas such as Alexa hardware while doubling down on high-impact bets. He took a deep look across the company—business by business, invention by invention—asking whether each initiative had the long-term potential to drive revenue, operating income, free cash flow, and return on invested capital. This led to shutting down businesses like Amazon Bookstores, 4-Star stores, Amazon Fabric, and Amazon Care, as well as eliminating underperforming device categories and amending unprofitable programs like free shipping for online grocery orders. Jassy also reprioritized resources, which included making the difficult decision to eliminate 27,000 corporate roles. His disciplined approach has streamlined Amazon’s cost structure and positioned it for more sustainable, high-return growth.

• AI as the Next AWS Moment: Just as AWS refounded Amazon’s business model, Jassy is betting big on AI across Amazon’s cloud, e-commerce, and devices.

• Scaling Leadership Beyond One Founder: Jassy is proving that reinvention is a mindset, not just a founder. His tenure will test whether Amazon can remain bold without its original leader. Great companies outlast their founders, which is why refounder must be part of the design.

MoneyGram’s Re-Founding Moment

MoneyGram is at an inflection point. Our re-founding is an opportunity to accelerate growth and deliver greater value at scale. Our mission remains the same: to connect the world by making the movement of money seamless, affordable, and secure. But how we achieve it must fundamentally change.

The industry is shifting, customer expectations are rising, and AI is redefining both what we deliver and how we deliver it. What worked before will not work going forward. Every function—product, engineering, marketing, sales, and finance—must rethink how it delivers value and drives impact for our customers. We have the opportunity to make global payments faster, smarter, and more cost-effective while expanding our total addressable market. Now it’s on us to execute.

Like Microsoft, Amazon, and Uber, we are preserving what makes us great while eliminating what holds us back. The best companies do not wait for reinvention. They make it their advantage. That is exactly what we are doing now.

The World Doesn’t Stand Still. Neither Should Your Company.

Re-founding is about building to effectively compete and win for the future. The best leaders act before reinvention becomes an obvious need because by then it’s often too late. Ask yourself:

• Are you optimizing your business for the past or building to win the future?

• What areas and bets must you change today to re-found your company for the next decade?

Because in business, there are only two choices: reinvent or be left behind.