| ▲ | mikert89 2 hours ago |
| 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 |
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| ▲ | pj_mukh an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| "This is actually how the world works" 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. 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. |
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| ▲ | mikert89 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | my comments are from living in nyc for 15 years, alot of lived experience and meeting people behind closed doors | | |
| ▲ | quacked 34 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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." |
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| ▲ | tclancy 29 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | e_i_pi_2 38 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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 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 |
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| ▲ | bluGill 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. Ivy types have a poor history of figuring out which is which in advance though. |
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| ▲ | bdcravens an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | shimman 41 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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? 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. Not too mention most corporations + startups are setup to encourage the worse forms of human collaboration (dictatorships + centrally planned economies). |
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| ▲ | mikert89 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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 | |
| ▲ | kibwen 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | antasvara an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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 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." > By that measure, you might as well save yourself the executive compensation and potential for disaster by just not having a CEO at all Sure, but somebody 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. | | |
| ▲ | jmalicki 41 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > But you now have to trust that each department head is making good decisions. There is a lot of evidence that corporate mergers destroy value. What if... they were disintermediated by markets instead of being one company? 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. | |
| ▲ | dd8601fn 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Nah. We know what good looks like in financial results and reputation. It's really not that complicated. The rest of that bullshit isn't about evaluating a working company, it's about gamblers gambling on non-companies before they become real companies. | |
| ▲ | couchand an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. Which helps explain the "need" for CEOs to meddle. |
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| ▲ | mikert89 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | yeah just sit there, keep a steady hand, and project confidence | | |
| ▲ | sokoloff an hour ago | parent [-] | | There are a lot of well-functioning organizations for which that’s exactly what’s needed. Leaders should be paid for outcomes not activities. | | |
| ▲ | jmalicki 39 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Outcomes of leadership are hard to measure. If you pay by success of the company, noone is going to want to do a 5 year corporate turnaround. |
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| ▲ | dexterdog 39 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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? |
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| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | bko 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Investors aren't dumb. What does Ivy gain in this trade by just raising a lot of money and running it poorly? You think he can raise a huge round and just decide to pay himself $20m a year? 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. This is actually how the world works. |
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| ▲ | mikert89 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 there is alot of beta involved, i.e. put 10M into payroll startup xyz, expect some rate of return. | |
| ▲ | bluecheese452 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | palata an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Investors aren't dumb. 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. |
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| ▲ | sumanthvepa an hour ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Dammit! Why am I the only 'Ivy type' that cannot raise a round?!!! . |
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