CEO Skills Rarity
This cluster debates the unique skills, rarity, and origins of effective CEOs, especially in tech and startups, contrasting them with more trainable roles like engineering and distinguishing founders from professional executives.
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You think CEOs get formed as easily as engineers coming out of a bootcamp?
As a founder/CEO who started as a programmer, I have been running my second company for 15 years. I am not great, but I got the company to be sizable and profitable.1. I will take five automated CEOs. If I can split my company into five distinct companies (one per product), it would be amazing. We are splitting the company into two to streamline focus on different/incompatible industries, and I am dreading the process of finding another CEO. It is very, very hard.2. I know a lot
CEO and tech skills are vastlty different. Doubt most startup CEOs would ever get hired by Google
All the CEOs who worked their way up through the company they are CEO of. Eg. Tim Cook.
recent developments have erased any preconceived notions that I had that getting to CEO level required some level of basic competencemusk, spez, zuck, bobby kotickno, they're just idiots who were in the right place at the right time(and maybe had good advisors, but apparently no longer)
This is a really, really naive thing to say - bordering on completely delusional. The CEO job is so much harder than you think it is. As a VC I see a huge number of amazing engineers and very few amazing CEOs. They are incredibly hard to find and can change the outcome of a company from a complete failure to a wild success. You MAY be able to do their job but in my experience very few can do it competently.
Isn't that the case for most ultra-rich CEOs? All of the CEOs of Microsoft apparently started off either building product or helping develop the business into something profitable. But at some point it doesn't really matter if you have the skills to be an individual contributor, a team leader, or even a vice president. The role of CEO mostly is to keep investors happy & secondarily to put the right people in the company together to make things happen.
Pretty difficult to be the CEO of a tech company without founding it.
Having spoken to actual CEOs, I think it's a bit of a stretch to put them in the same class as famous architects and composers. The latter are identifiable, and to some degree quantifiable, skillsets that require training and a certain degree of talent. I'm not so sure you can say the same thing about being the guy who makes sure that cross disciplinary paradigms for excellence synergize with the vision's core values.....
Sort of like the ceos of technology companies.