> did you feel that most CEOs that you met along your journey were similar to you (passionate, technical founder) or something else (MBA fast-track to an executive role)?
I doubt my (or anyone else's) personal experience of CEOs we've met is very useful since it's a small sample from an incredibly diverse population. The CEO of the F500 valley tech giant I sold my startup to had an engineering degree and an MBA. He had advanced up the engineering management ladder at various valley startups as an early employee and also been hired into valley giants in product management. He was whip smart, deeply experienced, ethical and doing his best at a job where there are few easy or perfect answers. I didn't always agree with his decisions but I never felt his positions were unreasonable. Where we reached different conclusions it was usually due to weighing trade-offs differently, assigning different probabilities and valuing likely outcomes differently. Sometimes it came down to different past experiences or assessing the abilities of individuals differently but these are subjective judgements where none of us is perfect.
It seems like you're trying to reduce a complex and varied range of disparate individuals and contexts into a more black and white narrative. The archetypical passionate tech founder vs the clueless coin-operated MBA suit is a false dichotomy. Reality is rarely that tidy or clear under the surface. I've seen people who fit the "passionate tech founder" narrative fuck up a company and screw over customers and employees through incompetence, ego and self-centered greed. I've seen others who fit the broad strokes of the "B-School MBA who never wrote a line of code" character sagely guide a tech company by choosing great technologists and deferring to them when appropriate while guiding the company with wisdom and compassion.
You can certainly find examples to confirm your biases but interpreting the world through that lens is unlikely to serve you well. Each company context is unique and even people who look like they're from central casting can defy expectations. If we look at the current crop of valley CEOs like Nadella, Zuckerberg, Pichai, Musk and Altman, they don't reduce easily into simplistic framing. These are all complex, imperfect people who are undeniably brilliant on certain dimensions and inevitably flawed on others - just like you and I. Once we layer in the context of a large, public corporation with diverse stakeholders each with conflicting interests: customers, employees, management, shareholders, media, regulators and random people with strongly-held drive-by opinions - everything gets distorted. A public corporation CEO's job definition starts with a legally binding fiduciary duty to shareholders which will eventually put them into an no-win ethical conflict with one or more of the other stakeholder groups. After sitting in dozens of board meetings and executive staff meetings, I wouldn't have taken our CEO's job for any amount of money. Based on seeing it from the inside, I believe it's almost a certainty that at least one of some public corp CEO's actions which you found unethical from your bleacher seat was what you would have chosen yourself given the context, trade-offs and available choices the CEO actually faced.
These experiences have cured me of the tendency to pass judgement on the moral character of public corp CEOs who I don't personally know based only on mainstream and social media interpretations.
I doubt my (or anyone else's) personal experience of CEOs we've met is very useful since it's a small sample from an incredibly diverse population. The CEO of the F500 valley tech giant I sold my startup to had an engineering degree and an MBA. He had advanced up the engineering management ladder at various valley startups as an early employee and also been hired into valley giants in product management. He was whip smart, deeply experienced, ethical and doing his best at a job where there are few easy or perfect answers. I didn't always agree with his decisions but I never felt his positions were unreasonable. Where we reached different conclusions it was usually due to weighing trade-offs differently, assigning different probabilities and valuing likely outcomes differently. Sometimes it came down to different past experiences or assessing the abilities of individuals differently but these are subjective judgements where none of us is perfect.
It seems like you're trying to reduce a complex and varied range of disparate individuals and contexts into a more black and white narrative. The archetypical passionate tech founder vs the clueless coin-operated MBA suit is a false dichotomy. Reality is rarely that tidy or clear under the surface. I've seen people who fit the "passionate tech founder" narrative fuck up a company and screw over customers and employees through incompetence, ego and self-centered greed. I've seen others who fit the broad strokes of the "B-School MBA who never wrote a line of code" character sagely guide a tech company by choosing great technologists and deferring to them when appropriate while guiding the company with wisdom and compassion.
You can certainly find examples to confirm your biases but interpreting the world through that lens is unlikely to serve you well. Each company context is unique and even people who look like they're from central casting can defy expectations. If we look at the current crop of valley CEOs like Nadella, Zuckerberg, Pichai, Musk and Altman, they don't reduce easily into simplistic framing. These are all complex, imperfect people who are undeniably brilliant on certain dimensions and inevitably flawed on others - just like you and I. Once we layer in the context of a large, public corporation with diverse stakeholders each with conflicting interests: customers, employees, management, shareholders, media, regulators and random people with strongly-held drive-by opinions - everything gets distorted. A public corporation CEO's job definition starts with a legally binding fiduciary duty to shareholders which will eventually put them into an no-win ethical conflict with one or more of the other stakeholder groups. After sitting in dozens of board meetings and executive staff meetings, I wouldn't have taken our CEO's job for any amount of money. Based on seeing it from the inside, I believe it's almost a certainty that at least one of some public corp CEO's actions which you found unethical from your bleacher seat was what you would have chosen yourself given the context, trade-offs and available choices the CEO actually faced.
These experiences have cured me of the tendency to pass judgement on the moral character of public corp CEOs who I don't personally know based only on mainstream and social media interpretations.