For a public company, the CEO has to be a public CEO. Everyone takes on a different persona (some sell themselves as business geniuses, others as creative geniuses, and others as someone you wanna grab a beer with). Some really like it, and some do it begrudgingly. But at the end of the day, you can't be the same CEO of a public company as you were when you were private.

I've never known Jeff to hobnob with celebrities, travel in luxury or abandon his company. I'm not sure he's a "celebrity CEO" as much as he just became a public one, although I don't know him personally.

(FWIW, this is the reason I'd never want to go public. I personally don't like the system, but that doesn't mean it's not how the system works.)

Nominally, CEOs are supposed to run the company and help brew the culture that makes that company productive.

We've grown a bunch of celebrity CEOs because people stopped caring about how companies worked over the last 10 years of low interest rates. But now that it's harder to raise money, it's time to see these guys run the companies they built.

I don't think you can accuse Jeff of not caring about company culture. He built one of the defining dev cultures out there. Yes, this have changed as they've grown, but I've always found the people and offices of Twilio to be warm, productive and smart.

And Twilio was forged in the hardest time to raise money ever... 2008. If anyone knows how hard it is to build in a climate without easy money, it would be Jeff.

At google Eric had very little to do with product and engineering. He was still a very effective CEO.

His customers probably expected better products, whereas his developers expected another round of amazing perks and fun work.

The CEO’s job is to create value. The answer to your question is “it depends”.

If buyers of their services are impressed with his ability to live code and that moves the needle on results, then yes. If the same can be accomplished by having a non-CEO developer evangelist, then probably no.

Is it?

From the DJIA: can you even name the CEO of 3M? Cisco? Amex? Visa?

I don't think celebrity is a pre-req for being a CEO. And as OP suggests, it could even be a detriment.

Indeed, positive audience sentiment has an expiration date. He rode the wave too long, perhaps, but it is hard to know when to stop. All ongoing media productions (e.g. TV shows) suffer from the same problem and question of when to keep going and when to move on.

So even if it was a longstanding thing, pushing the content toward a more millenial/gen-z audience is still a new direction and risk.

In the end, the biggest factor was the dissonance between his warm, cozy "all in this together" messaging combined with grocery price hikes and news like this coming on the other side of it all: https://www.blogto.com/city/2022/11/loblaw-report-profit-foo...

If people aren't eating at restaurants, it is almost certain they are getting their food at the grocery store instead. For all the mockery of Galen, it seems the marketing strategy has been unbelievably successful.

That's probably why he continued to cast himself even as the audience focus shifted to millennials and gen-z. Letting someone laughing at you for a few minutes is no big deal. Watching them love you when they show up at your store over and over makes it all worthwhile, I'm sure.

You can level a lot of criticism at Jeff but I don't think this one applies.

I did reword my comment though, because I don't agree Jeff is a "celebrity" as much as a "public" CEO.

Ironically my previous partner works there and she didn't know anything about the company prior to taking the job so me not even getting a reply to my application was a jab. I've always seen twilio in a positive light they do some really interesting work.

I live in the city of their HQ. I have no clue who the people mentioned in this thread are either but it makes sense that they'd see the CEOs in a positive light with how much positive I hear(d) about the place.

1. Jack Dorsey. Founding era, founding engineer, forced out when Twitter was ~30 employees because he had no management experience.

2. Evan Williams. Growth era. Another founder, but one who had past experience dealing with hypergrowth, getting companies acquired, and working inside a big company.

3. Dick Costolo. Maturation era. Adult supervision, he's the professional CEO hired to manage Twitter because both of its previous CEOs were really startup people.

4. Jack Dorsey (2). Came back after gaining some political savvy and learning how to launch a boardroom coup. Founded Square in the meantime and got a bunch of experience being CEO of another company. Also famously the guy who shut down the Jan 6th insurrection by blocking the sitting U.S. president from Twitter.

5. Parag Agrawal. Caretaker; Twitter was in trouble by then and Jack Dorsey was either forced out or decided it was better to die a hero than be remembered as a villain.

6. Elon Musk. Bought Twitter in a fit of insanity.

7. Linda Yaccarino. Glass cliff. Installed as CEO so that X's eventual demise is not Elon Musk's problem.

If that's the case, the top layers of the system have space for so many CEOs. Some won't even care to be there, they'll just do their job and take the salary plus bonuses.

Jobs certainly was a celebrity CEO, and despite all the criticism of him, I've never once heard anyone imply he was bad for Apple (or its shareholders). Musk is a celebrity CEO, much to the detriment (and potentially benefit? who knows) of his companies.

Without googling, can you tell me the name of the CEO of Target? Sony? Texas Instruments? BMW? FedEx? Mitsubishi? Exxon? Home Depot? Siemens? Procter & Gamble? 3M? Nestle? Broadcom?

I certainly can't.

But I bet you can tell me who the CEOs of Tesla and Amazon are.

Just because whoever-is-in-charge-of-siemens hasn't run a vanity PR campaign to raise their personal profile, doesn't mean it would help the company if they did.

# Market caps:

Target 64.99B

Sony ~116B (I think)

TI 152B

BMW ~70B

Fedex 62B

Mitsubishi ~70B

Exxon 396B

Home Depot 343B

Siemens 141B

P&G 349B

3M 60B

Nestle ~290B

Broadcom 501B

...

Amazon 1520B

Tesla 750B

The sum of the market cap of the first group of companies is ~2.068T USD, while the sum of the second group is ~2.270T.

And of course the CEO of Tesla is(?) allegedly the richest man in the world, which is one of the reasons why people know him. And I honestly don't remember the name of the CEO of Amazon since Jeff Bezos stepped down.

Which is Twilio?

In tech circles, a very well known story though.

I can't imagine being offered a choice between owning (the company) Tesla or BMW and picking Tesla.

edit: Tesla did 4.2% of total market in 2023, outpacing VW, Subaru and BMW. They did 25% more sales in 2023 than 2022. They sell 500-700k/yr right now with 2023 being 660k. BMW delivered 550k cars worldwide.

https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-2023-u-s-market-share-volksw...

No. Look at S&P 500 CEOs.

It's more likely that someone as smart as George might have just looked at the fundamentals of the business and decided it could not keep this up over the long term.

or... it might have just been epic timing too. Probably.

That was gossip, of course; sure, George may have decided back then that -- even with all the growth he drove -- Twilio wasn't going anywhere long-term.

A CEO has to be the face of the company and needs a good reputation. It seems like he was a good leader.

From an outsider it looks wrong.