I know this is a common trope here, and yeah, plenty of MBA-type CEOs are trash. But speaking as a founder/CEO of a small company, the quality gap between an average hire and top talent at the director level is night and day.<p>Proven talent comes with a massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it. The times I regretted going with the 2nd or 3rd place candidate because they were cheaper ended up setting us back by months.<p>The same logic applies to CEOs. Moving the needle for a massive company by even a few percent is worth billions. Just look at Lisa Su or Steve Jobs.
But a lot of "proven" talent with a huge price tag is also no good, really achieved what they did elsewhere due to sheer luck/help from a product that couldn't go wrong, and will drag you into a hole with their comp. I have seen this over and over again: Big pedigree, top of the line personality, zero results.<p>Everyone thinks they are hiring the star, not the fraudster, or just the lucky one. That's how we end up with overpaid execs.
From my experience, "Big pedigree, top of the line personality, zero results" isn't about hiring a CEO, it's about hiring in general.<p>Hiring is really hard and its relatively common for someone to look good on paper and do really well in interviews and completely bomb on the job.<p>The difference with hiring a CEO is that the blast radius is much larger for that role
The folly is thinking that getting hiring right is the solution at all.<p>As has been pointed out a) leaders matter, b) the difference in impact between great and mediocre/poor leadership is massive, c) even if you hire a great leader you can get poor results.<p>It follows then that spending more effort to find <i>just the right person is not enough.</i> You must also examine your overall organizational culture, your investors culture, your unspoken assumptions about the goals of your organization, etc etc.<p>And yes great leaders do all of this - of course - it becomes obvious upon reading my comment. But the point is great leaders doing this is not enough. The organization must be on the same page. You can lead a horse to water etc etc. And yes the leader can "Re-organize" but at that point you may find yourself faced with throwing the baby out with the bathwater unavoidably.<p>Leaders are necessary. And hiring is hard. But there is no one golden calf like "hire the perfect leader" that will solve a problem.<p>As with most things worth doing: you have to do it. Doing it is hard. And you might still not get the results you want.
They spend 18 rounds over six months vetting a developer with silly puzzles that must be solved from memory, with an audience. It's about as far from the job as possible.<p>This happened by trying to find capable people that didn't come to you through nepotism and paper mills and such.<p>The strange thing is that nobody has developed a hiring battery for the naturally hyperconfident employee you met through the grapevine, who costs you millions, and as often as not, irreparably damages the company.
>Leaders are necessary.<p>Sure, where would be biological lifeforms today if hadn’t been driven by some visionary leaders. Ooops? But I mean, now that humanity provide great leaders, biosphere is thriving like never before. Reooops?
And about startups. For a while the Stanford MBA + MIT CS founder duo guaranteed a pavlovian response from VC regardless their actual experience.
> really achieved what they did elsewhere due to sheer luck/help<p>This world view is not falsifiable. Regardless of success you can say it was luck.<p>But I just don’t understand this. In my work we are constantly giving people chances to take on more responsibility, and often they don’t want to, or it doesn’t work out. Why would you expect that you could drop them in as CEO?<p>Are CEOs always the cause of success or failure? No. Are they good at avoiding blame? Yes. Are they also extremely skilled and competent people? Yes.
You can't drop everyone in that position but there is a significant number that still could do it. It is not 100% more like 50%/60% luck.
It also depends on whether you're providing appropriate compensation for the responsibility that you're offering. I see several cases where managers offer more responsibility for a peanuts' worth of pay hike and then say the same stuff you said.
You know which people are eager to take on more responsibilities? The people who don't believe in the concept responsibility.
The guy who took over JC Penney's after leaving Apple's Retail division is a good example of this. On paper great pedigree. Success --but did not understand a different, albeit retail, market so well and things tanked horribly.
CEOs are basically dice rollers. "Proven" are just formerly lucky gamblers. The only control that CEO has is whether they roll the dice themselves or let their underlings roll. It's entirely possible that the only CEOs that are winning against the odds are the ones that roll themselves the least.
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No I think for the last 10-15 years, ivy types could legitimately just raise series A type money, run a company like shit, but capital was a moat and so ended up as CEOs.<p>This is actually how the world works
"This is actually how the world works"<p>The level to which our algorithmic feeds have made us so confidently wrong about things is so deeply problematic. Tech's original sin keeps biting us back. This rampant cynicism and nihilism borne from constant bombardment of headlines has us acting like we know the personal stories of all leadership all around the world, and it's deeply damaging to our trust in the system.<p>Plenty of Ivy League leaders quietly working away at their job, doing the best they can with great results and no one to write about them and you'll never hear about it anywhere. This is obvious to anyone on a second thought, but the first reactionary thought is what's acted on...always.
my comments are from living in nyc for 15 years, alot of lived experience and meeting people behind closed doors
I was part of a company that was doing 10s of M in revenue, a few hundred employees, and had the technical prowess and IP to become a multi billion unicorn but the blue blood CEO was so clueless that he lost literally his entire technical core staff to incredible mismanagement. My favorite memory of him, and this sounds like a fake anecdote, is that on a big emergency call where he was pulling a huge amount of engineers and project managers off an account that was on fire to help with an account that was even more on fire (thus depriving the original account of labor and guaranteeing it would be in the same state in a few weeks), he spent 5 minutes talking about the chartered fishing trip he was on in Canada and then asked the audience if anyone and any plans for the weekend. Someone spoke up and said "yeah, I'll be working."
But have you been inside the old money, prep school world? It is absolutely about connections and getting into the system for the most part. The meritocracy bootstrap stuff is life coaching fluff to keep us in the middle grinding.
I'd argue that the "rampant cynicism and nihilism" and more a result of the environment than algorithms manipulating people, the content is also made by other people, and it just serves up what people want. Your feed is often just a reflection of what you're feeling since everyone has their own feed instead of the reddit or HN approach with a shared feed. Also the phrase is that a few bad apples spoil the batch, nobody cares about the rest of the batch until you can get rid of the bad ones<p>I'm much more a descriptivist than prescriptivist so if there's a pattern among people I'm inclined to think it's a true issue instead of people just thinking "wrong" en-masse
"Your feed is often just a reflection of what you're feeling"<p>No it is not. The feed is optimized for what will increase the intensity of feelings, and bad feelings are more easily optimized than good. Meta (patient zero for this nonsense) has pretty much said so, multiple times.<p>" more a result of the environment than algorithms"<p>What environment? People are sitting on their algorithms for 100x more time than any physical environment.
i dont think hating on ivy league types is that common, and 90% of people have no real life experience with this kind of thing, or are even aware of how corporate hiring/funding works at the higher level.
You are confusing CEO pay with CEO ability. There is plenty of examples of companies doing poorly until a new CEO comes in, and others of a company doing well until the CEO retires and a replacement comes in.<p>Ivy types have a poor history of figuring out which is which in advance though.
I think it's the other way around. They're not talking about CEO ability, they're talking about CEO performance, which aren't the same. Money follows performance (based on outcomes, not actual talent). It's like professional sports - win a championship, get a big payday, regardless of how it happened.
No, the only thing that matters is what you can negotiate. Since most executives + board vote on their own salaries, which ones have you ever seen negotiated to lower their salaries?<p>It's an extreme abuse of power, especially since workers are the sole reason why a company is able to succeed or not and they don't get the same privileges as a board + executive.<p>Not too mention most corporations + startups are setup to encourage the worse forms of human collaboration (dictatorships + centrally planned economies).
no its not like that, these people get plopped into positions of power, and alot of time theres no good way to assess their performance
There's an equally valid hypothesis that a "good" CEO is just one that keeps their hands off the levers of power, doesn't rock the boat or fuck anything up, and quietly lets a good company perform; whereas a bad CEO is one who, due to ego and self-aggrandizement, can't help but impose themselves via meddling and prevent a good company from performing. By that measure, you might as well save yourself the executive compensation and potential for disaster by just not having a CEO at all, despite what the executive class would have you believe. The aristocracy of old also argued that their titles were earned and that society could not function without them.
> a "good" CEO is just one that keeps their hands off the levers of power, doesn't rock the boat or fuck anything up, and quietly lets a good company perform<p>How can you tell if a company is good? Because trillions of dollars are spent by banks, private equity, hedge funds, and others truing to figure out if a company is "good."<p>> By that measure, you might as well save yourself the executive compensation and potential for disaster by just not having a CEO at all<p>Sure, but <i>somebody</i> is still making the decisions the CEO would have otherwise made. Maybe it's a good thing that the power isn't concentrated in one person; I'd be open to that. But you now have to trust that each department head is making good decisions. That's fine if they were already making good decisions, hit it's disastrous if they weren't.
There are plenty of anecdotal examples of co-CEOs not working very well.
> But you now have to trust that each department head is making good decisions.<p>There is a lot of evidence that corporate mergers destroy value.<p>What if... they were disintermediated by markets instead of being one company?<p>There are tons of reasons why companies exist (the whole Theory of the Firm line of research), but the information asymmetry barriers are constantly coming down.
Nah.<p>We know what good looks like in financial results and reputation. It's really not that complicated.<p>The rest of that bullshit isn't about evaluating a working company, it's about gamblers gambling on non-companies <i>before</i> they become real companies.
And in truth it's a paradox. The better a company is (generally correlated to an empowered workforce with a sense of agency and purpose), the harder it is to extract profit for the capitalist class.<p>Which helps explain the "need" for CEOs to meddle.
yeah just sit there, keep a steady hand, and project confidence
In the startup world they're only really looking to bat better than 10 pct overall to mark success, right? Do we wonder why it's all just a crap shoot?
Investors aren't dumb. What does Ivy gain in this trade by just raising a lot of money and running it poorly?<p>You think he can raise a huge round and just decide to pay himself $20m a year?<p>Capital is not a moat. There are entire industries (VC, PE, Banks, etc) that are looking to write checks. Nothing would make them happier than to give you money, under the condition that there is significant upside (more VC) or assets (PE, Banks) and you commit to doing the hard work for very little pay.<p>This is actually how the world works.
the world doesnt work like an efficient machine, and capital is far more of a moat than people want to admit. these "founders" are more like professional managers from the same backgrounds as the investors<p>there is alot of beta involved, i.e. put 10M into payroll startup xyz, expect some rate of return.
Assuming he doesn’t completely shit the bed he can spin any mediocre tenure into a great success and now he has experience running a company.
> Investors aren't dumb.<p>They are not dumb, just incompetent in the domains where they invest the money. And surrounded by yes-men because they are the ones writing the checks.
Dammit! Why am I the only 'Ivy type' that cannot raise a round?!!! .
> speaking as a founder/CEO<p>> massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it<p>The "Obama putting a medal around Obama's neck" meme seems appropriate here.
That's only if the company's revenue is in excess of 100B. There aren't many companies like that. Certainly not enough for an AI platform to monetize.<p>But don't you fall in the same trap as they try to lure you with: expressing a CEO's value as revenue/profit optimization? With that kind of logic, you should pivot your business, whatever it is, to whatever is looking more profitable in the short term. It's short-sighted. And it misses the ethical and social aspect of the organization that forms the company.
> Proven talent comes with a massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it.<p>Tall guy with good hair, smooth talker, in the same socio-economic circles, buddies with the board/investors, social drinker for networking, knows a lot about costly hobbies and 'interesting' experiences (pilot license, restores classic cars, has exotic car collection, golf) .....
I feel like you're suffering from some sort of confirmation bias.<p>I've worked under a top talent CEO, and the company collapsed. He made some gambles and they just didn't work out. I am not convinced that a third-rate version of him would have done significantly worse.
Is it just that the company collapsed? The third-rate version of him probably would have ended up in jail a-la SBF or Ms Holmes, with hopefully no one getting killed or maimed, or chemicals in a factory causing cancer across neighborhoods or poisoning wells or something.<p>There are things worse than losing your job.
Or maybe the third rate version would have made different choices, and those may have due to pure chance worked out well for us.
Only truly exceptional executives can be SBF or Elizabeth Holmes.
Genuine questions from the ground floor:<p>How do you spot the quality candidates in those top roles? It seems like forecasting success is exponentially harder when the skills are so qualitative and contextual.<p>And I have not yet witnessed an organization that is comfortable with the risk of promoting an internal "nobody" relative to someone with plausible credentials or from outside. If you're stuck with MBA-type CEOs, how do you fix them or mitigate their damage from above?
> Just look at Lisa Su or Steve Jobs.<p>It has a name, it's called "survivorship bias".
Good leadership makes a huge difference - whether that be big or small. I've seen it myself - in particular it's amazing much of a difference good leadership can make at a huge company.<p>However at the same time it can also be true that some leaders are either poor or make no difference - but as long as they don't have to react to external change ( or only do so as part of a herd ) they can coast quite happily for years while 'earning' huge rewards.<p>Leadership is only really tested when the right course is a different one from either the past or your peers.
The site is satire… I don’t think it’s a serious pitch for “replace your CEO with AI”, it’s “hey, CEOs, if you disagree with this, why don’t you apply the same logic to all the parts of your business and all the employees you’ve confidently stated will be replaced by AI?”
> The times I regretted going with the 2nd or 3rd place candidate because they were cheaper ended up setting us back by months.<p>Roughly, how did it become clear that the second or third place candidates set the company back by months? Did the company ultimately hire the first place candidate and discover their superior effectiveness in the org?
But speaking as top talent, the quality gap between an average hire and me is night and day. I'm worth it.
You’re getting a lot of pushback, but I’m genuinely interested in your experiences. What differences have you seen between average and top leaders? Not in results, but in terms of how they approached the job?
"Top talent" - I'm curious, do you really believe this is a normal / proper / desirable way of talking about other people?
Sounds a bit like casting lingo in performing arts, but other than that, not sure what you're hinting at.
Yes. Highly accountable and responsible people with deep knowledge are rare.
It is logical that there are people who are great at what they do and others who are not. We’ve all worked with both and if you are in the business of finding talented people, how else would you talk about it?
I'm not OP but I think it is both normal, proper, and desirable.
... What are you getting at, I'm genuinely curious? What's wrong with the phrase "top talent"!?
I don't know, sounds very off putting, just like "resources" in "human resources". I get that this is normalized in all the corporations, but one still can choose to use terms that don't reduce people to "value produced".
Good employees are good and bad employees are bad?<p>"proven talent"?
Most CEOs are not Lisa Su or Steve Jobs, or even remotely close. Current AI could surely do better than the majority of them.
Like others have said - many people at the top are so successful because they ended up at the right place and right time, and their approach just fit exactly the problem at hand. They did not see the future, they just had a hunch - and that can go either way.<p>Put them anywhere else and it will be a disaster.<p>A good case study of this is Ron Johnson, who did miracles at Apple and then ran J.C. Penny into the ground.<p>If you look at the causes, it was blatantly obvious what he was doing wrong (doing away with sale prices). It's a kind of fundamental thing that one could understand by just asking some questions. Maybe it's not genius, maybe people "just do things" and they just happen to work once.<p>Most success stories are accidental, and one's ability to succeed really depends on how many times they are allowed to fail first.<p>Most of us here - we have no such luxury. We fail, we become homeless.<p>There are exceptions, of course, and there are truly talented managers out there. If I look around, however, all I see is clown cars accidentally driving into gold mines.
Proven talent like Carly Fiorina, Gerald Levin, and Ken Lay?
I think there are parallels here to software development.<p>When starting a brand new project it’s better to have a lot of human involvement to make sure the AI is creating a foundation that actually matches requirements, both spoken and unspoken. But once the project reaches maturity it’s more realistic to imagine an AI working on top of that concrete layer.<p>So goes management. Bootstrapping a new company? Needs human involvement. A company just ticking along? I’m less convinced. Or to be more specific, as a developer who is told my work is obsolete by CEOs, I’m interested to know why they don’t apply the same logic inwards.
Is a company ever really just "ticking along" though? Seems to me like you're always sliding one way or the other, largely due to leadership at the top.
> A company just ticking along?<p>Environment around you changes all the time which means if a company wants to stay around it needs to be able to adapt at any moment.
the thing about CEOs (well let us just say strategic/visionary) leaders since they're found across the whole org chart level - is finding them is very difficult since assessing their skills is also difficult.<p>past success does not mean future success. cz one might just have circumstantial.<p>so what tends to happen shitty leaders are promoted based on "reasonable/visible" metrics - such as having an MBA, etc.
See, this is something I’ve had to reconcile: founders aren’t CEOs, and CEOs aren’t founders.<p>I remain unconvinced a CEO is needed in any real, modern capacity. A large enough company has a PR person (who can do the interviews and sell the messaging), an Ops person (who translates Board guidance into actionable work for specific teams and vice versa), a slew of specialty technical people, and a Board who generally sets the course for the firm.<p>The CEO <i>claims</i> to do all of those, but increasingly - <i>especially</i> in large or mature firms - they’re just public celebrities hoovering up revenue and making connections with other CEOs. It’s a multi-million dollar fleecing of corporate resources to support one dude’s luxury lifestyle. They’re not steering the business so much as making sure we scratch the backs of their buddies to make gameable KPIs look good to the Board, and in <i>that</i> context they’re easily tossed aside.
CEOs are also Fall Guys. A fall guy is the person who takes the blame when the whole thing falls apart.<p>I’ve worked with exceptional CEOs at start ups. A startup CEO has to be a good sales person. They need to be able to make that final pitch to sell the company.<p>Then everyone ideally cashes out and we’re all rich without the need to ever work again.<p>It’s probably not going to happen, but I often dream of getting rich and in my retirement running a game studio in a low cost of living country.<p>I want to literally code right alongside my employees and pay them fair wages even if we make no money.<p>Good basic games. A strict no DLC policy and full open source( if possible) 5 years after release.
> CEOs are also Fall Guys. A fall guy is the person who takes the blame when the whole thing falls apart.<p>Do you have an example of this? The usual criticism of CEOs is based on the exact opposite; that <i>we</i> are the fall guys, and that CEOs usually profit (and are rarely punished for) their own failed decisions.<p>Looking back at all the companies I've worked for, I can't think of one time a CEO actually suffered blowback for serious mistakes. The closest would be Steve Jobs having been let go from Apple, but that was in 1985 and he wasn't even the CEO back then.
That's the point isn't it? You overpay a wealthy dude with connections to gain a node on nepotism graph.
The problem is anyone can point to examples of good CEOs and bad CEOs. John Sculley and Rory Read also got paid a ton of money. It's not clear what you need to know a priori to actually pick a good CEO.
Steve jobs said the same thing. however, we need to define great talent. imo they are laser focused people who also love helping others.<p>unfortunately, have seen too much arrogance in corporate, and have always asked what if that person has been a humble guy?
The same thing is true in software engineering: an AI model is equivalent to an average programer (average with a huge standard deviation). Averigua is better than half, but still way behind the top performers
I would like to replace a few CIOs or CTOs at some companies, software quality has been down the drain since before AI. It's just terrible. Stock market pricing driven development is a detriment on software quality.<p>I was never a "fanboy" of Jeff Bezos, but I do admire when people do or take the correct approach, I say that to preface that I admire that early on he would tell investors that he's only to be considered as a long term investment, which I wish the stock market had some way to protect these sorts of stocks from the whims of people who quickly crash the value of a company on speculation or other meaningless metrics when you're heavily investing in R&D and have one bad quarter, maybe two, but your third quarter will yield results, but oh no, you have to fire people to make the market happy, so your efforts are ruined.
What matters is their connections to powerful people. That's what you buy.
the quality gap between an average hire and top talent ̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶d̶i̶r̶e̶c̶t̶o̶r̶ ̶l̶e̶v̶e̶l̶ ̶ is night and day.<p>Fixed that for ya.
Steve Jobs was a founder, not your average CEO hire. He built the company from scratch.
Is Steve Jobs even a good example of "the type of person I want to hire as CEO"? I think he probably is not.<p>He was a demonstrably bad CEO, so much so that the Apple board fired him. He then went on to get better at the job through running another two companies until, eventually, Apple purchased one of these companies (it was very much unsuccessful, BTW). Then he became CEO and the company and was, finally, phenomenally successful.
The question remains whether that was all him or a combination of Wozniak and Ive, on top of being at the right place(s) at the right time(s) (iMac, iPod, iPhone).<p>Also he died 15 years ago, but Apple's success (measured in market cap at least) went up more than 10x since he died (from 300-400B to 3-4T), under Tim Cook. That's arguably from the groundwork and reputation the company laid down 15 years ago, but still - few companies manage to keep growing on stuff they did 15 years ago. Oil industry notwithstanding.
You can still find articles lambasting the iphone for having a small screen, 'who would want to surf the web on their phone'.<p>The CEO is in large part responsible for picking what products have hope to grow the company. The iphone was far from a slam dunk, many thought it would fail. Now it's responsible for over half their revenue and they're one of the largest companies in the world.<p>>Then he became CEO and the company and was, finally, phenomenally successful.<p>I'm totally confused by your post, so you admit he became a good CEO then?
Man, everyone is demonstrably bad - until they aren't. Some things, like being CEO, are much more rare in the "try, try, try again" space, but it does seem to work like most things. My son was a terrible, demonstrably bad hitter for ~2 years. Then, all of a sudden, he was not, nor will he ever be again.
Steve Jobs was hired as the CEO of Apple when the company was 20 years old. He was never CEO before that.
Ars had an interesting story, yesterday: <a href="https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/07/on-the-run-for-20-years-most-wanted-fugitive-caught-hiding-as-a-biotech-exec/" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/07/on-the-run-for-20-yea...</a><p>Looks like this guy was considered "proven," by his company. So much, so, that they didn't even bother checking his basic <i>bona fides</i>. Wouldn’t surprise me, if he was actually pretty good at his job.<p>I think a lot of the "proof" at this level, is Mastery of the Bro-Fu. If you can speak the right language, wear the right watch, and drive the right car, the key to the executive washroom is tossed to you, without a second thought.
Kings get a bad rap, but for most of history, peasants <i>loved</i> their kings. Why? Not because kings were great people, but because kings kept the lower-tier nobility in check. Peasants had rights, and could actually become quite wealthy, when kings put limits on the local lords.<p>The same applies to CEOs. Steve Jobs was a narcissist, but he probably kept a hundred other bikeshedding assholes (who had just as much ego, but far less taste) in check, and that's why Apple was able to function in spite of itself.
> Proven talent comes with a massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it.<p>How often is the only proof the price tag from their previous position?
There's a huge difference between managing a small company in a competitive marketing with self-funding and the administration of the giant public corporations in a increasingly concentrated marketing.<p>And then, there is the whole layers of wannabees in the middle market.
I'd feel better hearing this type of sentiment from someone with less vested interest in this type of sentiment.
Whoa there buddy, you are highlighting that true talent, like beauty, actually does exist. This kind of thinking is not tolerable on Hacker News.
Months? Most terrible founders and CEOs I've worked for set the company back years, and most of the time significantly damaged it to the point of no return for everyone involved. The worst ones are the arrogant, low-skill and/or low-effort bunch. They destroy the soul of the company, drive away customers, talent and loot whatever value is left in the company and take for themselves.
I respect your opinion, but behind winners imho there's 99% being in the right place at the right time. And people change and so do their motivation.<p>I'm not saying top talent doesn't make the difference, I'm just saying that CVs and impressions aren't always completely related.
> speaking as a founder/CEO [...] Proven talent comes with a massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it.<p>I see no bias here /s.
Unfortunately this is not what 95% of HN wants to hear, even though its the truth. But you have my upvote.