I was wading thru my daily ration of VC blogs just now, when something caught my eye. Or I perhaps I should say, I was “submerged, weightless, suspended in the tepid depths of the thing… in a state of perfect sensory deprivation, when all at once an extraordinary thing happened: I noticed something!"
(Thank you Mr. Wolfe)
There is the midst of Fred (A VC)’s 30 thoughts at 30,000 feet, it was:
Should the CEO of every technology company be a technologist? It seems like it’s easier to teach a technologist finance, marketing, sales, and management than it is to teach a good manager technology. And it seems that key business drivers are increasingly technical. It was true in the past, when Novell beat Banyan with marketing over technology, or when Oracle beat a host of relational database companies with sales over technology, that technology alone didn’t win the day. But let’s look at Facebook versus MySpace, Google versus Yahoo!, Skype versus Net2Phone, and Apple versus the entire music business. The companies with strong technologists as leaders seem to win more often these days.
I could hardly believe my eyes! Back when my associates and I used to do silly things like meet endlessly with VC’s (and you know who you are) I often heard about how “we would need to hire a CEO cause, ahem, everyone knows technologists cannot run a company.”
Now that we are entering the commodity period for software startups, these people must be getting desperate. “Sure, we’ll let you be CEO…”
