Micromanaging’s sudden reputation glow-up comes courtesy of an essay by Paul Graham, co-founder of renowned accelerator Y Combinator, where he excoriated “manager mode” or the hiring of professional managers to scale up startups and praised “founder mode” or founders staying enmeshed in the details of their creations.

The essay was prompted by Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky’s recent talk at a Y Combinator event in which he recounts following conventional wisdom to assume manager mode, leading to disastrous results for Airbnb. Manager mode “is so much less effective that to founders it feels broken,” writes Graham. “There are things founders can do that managers can’t, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because it is.”

Although Graham doesn’t define founder mode with specificity, one thing that’s clear about it is it’s largely associated with men, including Chesky, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. Calling founder mode a “new buzzword Silicon Valley bros are frothing at the mouth over,” the publication Girlboss notes in an email that, “Women who participate in founder mode have been publicly criticized, canceled or ousted from their own company. Smells like sexism to us.”

Acknowledging sexism, Chesky posted on X, “Women founders have been reaching out to me over the past 24 hours about how they don’t have permission to run their companies in Founder Mode the same way men can. This needs to change.”

Diving into the discussion of founder mode versus manager mode, for the latest edition of our ongoing series posing questions relevant to indie beauty and wellness, we asked 14 beauty and wellness brand founders the following: Do you operate your business on founder or manager mode? What’s an example of how you’ve made decisions in that mode? What do you think Graham’s dichotomy is missing about the realities of growing a consumer beauty and wellness brand?