Across Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs are clashing with the professionals hired to oversee the companies they founded — and they seem to have the upper hand.

Why it matters: In Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs are known as "founders" and are broadly exalted. Hired hands, by contrast, are seen as "professional fakers" who often "drive the company into the ground," as venture capitalist Paul Graham put it in a controversial essay this month.

• There's a tenuous degree of consensus around the idea that founders and professionals do run companies in significantly different ways — even if there's much less agreement on which one might be superior.

Driving the news: 23&Me founder Anne Wojcicki declared herself "surprised and disappointed" this week that all seven of the company's independent directors, including Sequoia chief Roelof Botha, had resigned en masse, declaring they were fed up with waiting for her to come up with a take-private proposal they could sign onto.

• Wojcicki's "concentrated voting power," they wrote, effectively meant that they had no control over the company's fate.
• Even though 23&Me's share price is languishing at 35 cents and its market capitalization is below $200 million, Wojcicki — the ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergei Brin, and a signatory to the Giving Pledge — seems to be unwilling to pay a premium to shareholders in her attempt to take her company private.

Between the lines: Wojcicki's governance fight echoes the battles at Bolt Financial and OpenAI, where founders Ryan Breslow and Sam Altman have faced similarly vocal opposition to their leadership.

The big picture: Silicon Valley is coalescing around the idea that professional management does more harm than good.

• "How to run a company if you're merely a professional manager," writes Graham, "is so much less effective that to founders it feels broken."

The other side: The problem isn't the professionals, says Dave Karpf of George Washington University in an impassioned rejoinder. Rather, it's Paul Graham himself.

• Where Graham says that CEOs are very good at managing up and therefore "include some of the most skillful liars in the world," Karpf makes exactly the same claim about OpenAI's Altman, a Graham protégé, who has demonstrated a "remarkable flair for failing upward."

Where it stands: The archetypal Silicon Valley heroic founder is Steve Jobs, and Graham explicitly says that founders should "run their companies like Steve Jobs instead of John Sculley," the hired CEO who replaced him at Apple.

• Karpf, by contrast, says that "young-Steve-Jobs was a horrendous manager" and only became good at running Apple after he left, learned more about management, and returned as a hired CEO with no founder shares.
• The VC-dominated Silicon Valley of today, says Karpf, tends to reward non-technical founders like Altman or Peter Thiel, rather than technical hacker-geniuses like Aaron Swartz or Steve Wozniak.

The intrigue: Perhaps, writes author Dan Davies, founders are best thought of as keepers of the corporate soul.

• So long as they have that position, he says, "whether you get rich or not will depend on whether your founder is a genius or a dud."

The bottom line: Professional CEOs like Satya Nadella at Microsoft and Tim Cook at Apple have created trillions of dollars of wealth. But they'll never receive the reverence afforded to Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.

Waffle House pays its tipped workers less than minimum wage to put in hours of un-tipped work — cleaning bathrooms, cooking and washing dishes — according to a union complaint filed Thursday at the Labor Department.

Why it matters: Tipped workers are in the national spotlight, with first Donald Trump and then Kamala Harris, promising to get rid of taxes on tips. Many restaurant workers don't earn enough to owe income tax, so higher minimum wages might be a more pressing need.

• Of all the low-wage industries, restaurants are among the most frequently found to be violating the wage laws, per the Labor Department.

Between the lines: Under federal law, tipped workers can earn as little as $2.13 an hour.

• These workers can have related duties — like a bartender washing glasses or a server clearing tables. But per Labor Department guidance, if you're doing a whole different kind of work, then an employer has to pay at least minimum wage.

Zoom in: The Union of Southern Service Workers said it interviewed more than 20 current and former Waffle House workers across several states and reviewed the chain's written policies.

• Workers laid out how the diner chain, which is open 24/7, has a bare-bones staff at its restaurant. The company doesn't employ dishwashers, kitchen helpers or janitors, per the complaint. Instead, servers do the work, earning the tipped minimum wage.
• Often this takes them more than an hour. Some spend nearly half their shift.

Waffle House did not respond to email and phone requests for comment.

Zoom out: The union is affiliated with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and has been trying to organize Waffle House workers.

• Earlier this year, it filed a complaint over the chain's policy of charging staff $3 a shift for a meal whether or not workers eat the food.
• After that the chain, which has more than 1,900 locations across 25 states, said it would raise employees base pay to $3 an hour.

What's next: The union asked the Labor Department to launch an investigation.

• If the agency decides to move forward, that could mean fines for the company and recovered wages for the workers.