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Comment by siglesias | Hacker News Reader

Tried and true: founders make terrific CEOs.

EDIT, Context being tech: Hastings, Ellison, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Jobs, Gates. I'd say Google was a company in the spirit of these before WorldCom, Enron and Countrywide Financial.

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Except when they don't... Angelo Mozilo, Bernie Ebbers and Ken Lay (among many others) come to mind.

Bravo on conjuring a list of relevant counterexamples. Surely boards on product companies will look to the Enron scandal when assessing whether a founder has the competence or vision to lead a company.

They are criminally liable to do the due diligence assessments to make sure the books aren't being cooked, so yes I would hope at minimum the board is actively trying to prevent an Enron.

No, what was pertinent to the discussion was whether vision outweighs direct experience in this industry, which is not entirely obvious. I would say that vision is a trait that is generalizable to technology startup founders. Your counterexamples reference accounting fraud, the proclivity of which is not tied or correlated in a significant way to being a founder. A valid counterexample would reference the need for experience trumping vision in a startup founder's performance as CEO.

Simply put, you said "founders make terrific CEOs". That's just not true. Some do, some don't (because they steal, manage poorly, whatever).

You took what I said out of context and used cases of criminal accounting fraud as counterexamples. That's totally missing my point, which was pointing to character traits that founders have that outsiders with more traditional experience lack. The discussion of experience versus vision in tech leadership is critically important and worth exploring in a deep way.

You weren't pointing to traits specific to founders when you replied. You took a very broad interpretation of what I was saying and provided a counter to that broad interpretation. There's nothing particularly insightful or relevant in doing that.

and many mediocre ones no one's ever heard of.

Jerry Yang, Steve Ballmer.

Steve Ballmer didn't co-found Microsoft.

That's pretty much a survivorship bias, though. Tons more companies were cratered by their founders.

I hope that Larry Page is the next Steve Jobs, not the next Jerry Yang.

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