The buzz in tech circles over the past few days is all about “Founder Mode.”

Sparked by a recent talk at Y Combinator from Airbnb founder and CEO Brian Chesky — and a subsequent blog post from former YC leader Paul Graham — the debate focuses on how startup founders can be most effective at growing their companies.

“As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised [Chesky] that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale,” Graham writes. “Their advice could be optimistically summarized as ‘hire good people and give them room to do their jobs.’ He followed this advice and the results were disastrous.”

Graham challenges the conventional wisdom that founders should switch from “founder mode” to “manager mode” when they want to scale.

Rather than hiring new managers and getting out of the way, it might actually be better for founders to micromanage and be directly involved with all company operations, Graham writes.

Based on the reaction and commentary so far, there is no one-size-fits-all approach.

Take leaders of Seattle-area tech giants Amazon and Microsoft, for example.

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon out of his Bellevue, Wash., garage in 1994. He remained CEO as the company grew into an e-commerce and cloud computing behemoth, and didn’t step down until 2021.

Bezos could be described as a “founder mode” leader.

“Bezos & Zuck were both micro-managers, deep in the details of the product and business,” wrote Dan Rose, a former Amazon and Facebook exec. “They never set expectations of autonomy, and they fired anyone who resisted their oversight.”

Years of hands-on experience “gives founders as much, if not more, subject matter expertise as the top experts,” wrote Stephan Curial, CTO at Amazon seller software company Jungle Scout. He added that “they also have the advantage of a broader perspective due to the multifaceted nature of their role.”

On the other end of the spectrum, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella offers a “Hall of Fame” example of executing in “manager mode,” wrote Henrik Torstensson, a veteran entrepreneur and startup investor.

Nadella preaches a culture of individual empowerment.

“Every one of us needs to do our best work, lead and help drive cultural change,” he wrote to employees in his first company-wide memo. “We sometimes underestimate what we each can do to make things happen and overestimate what others need to do to move us forward. We must change this.”

Nadella was not a founder, but he had spent 22 years at the Redmond company before becoming its third CEO in 2014. Since then, Microsoft’s market capitalization has skyrocketed from around $300 billion to $3 trillion.

A similar example is Apple CEO Tim Cook, who replaced Steve Jobs in 2011. Apple’s market cap has also grown to more than $3 trillion.

Torstensson noted the nuance of the discussion.

“Managing organizations is not easy,” he wrote. “But it is not quite as simple as Founders are always great (even if I think it is hard to overstate founders’ value to a startup) and Managers are always bad.”