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.

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.

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.

Everyone thinks they are hiring the star, not the fraudster, or just the lucky one. That's how we end up with overpaid execs.

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.

This is actually how the world works

> speaking as a founder/CEO

> massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it

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.

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.

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.

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.

Genuine questions from the ground floor:

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.

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?

> The times I regretted going with the 2nd or 3rd place candidate because they were cheaper ended up setting us back by months.

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?

> Just look at Lisa Su or Steve Jobs.

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.

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.

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?”

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?

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.

past success does not mean future success. cz one might just have circumstantial.

so what tends to happen shitty leaders are promoted based on "reasonable/visible" metrics - such as having an MBA, etc.

But speaking as top talent, the quality gap between an average hire and me is night and day. I'm worth it.

Most CEOs are not Lisa Su or Steve Jobs, or even remotely close. Current AI could surely do better than the majority of them.

Good employees are good and bad employees are bad?

"proven talent"?

Proven talent like Carly Fiorina, Gerald Levin, and Ken Lay?

See, this is something I’ve had to reconcile: founders aren’t CEOs, and CEOs aren’t founders.

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.

The CEO claims to do all of those, but increasingly - especially 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 that context they’re easily tossed aside.

I think there are parallels here to software development.

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.

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.

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.

"Top talent" - I'm curious, do you really believe this is a normal / proper / desirable way of talking about other people?

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.

Put them anywhere else and it will be a disaster.

A good case study of this is Ron Johnson, who did miracles at Apple and then ran J.C. Penny into the ground.

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.

Most success stories are accidental, and one's ability to succeed really depends on how many times they are allowed to fail first.

Most of us here - we have no such luxury. We fail, we become homeless.

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.

Steve jobs said the same thing. however, we need to define great talent. imo they are laser focused people who also love helping others.

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.

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.

Fixed that for ya.

Steve Jobs was a founder, not your average CEO hire. He built the company from scratch.

Ars had an interesting story, yesterday: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/07/on-the-run-for-20-yea...

Looks like this guy was considered "proven," by his company. So much, so, that they didn't even bother checking his basic bona fides. Wouldn’t surprise me, if he was actually pretty good at his job.

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 loved 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.

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.

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.

And then, there is the whole layers of wannabees in the middle market.

> Proven talent comes with a massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it.

How often is the only proof the price tag from their previous position?

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.

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.

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.