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Comment by adrianomartins | Hacker News Reader

One might ask, if the CEO does 1% of finance, and 0% of technology, what does a CEO do? Office, HR, comms management?

"Well--well look. I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?"

"Office Space" reference for anyone wondering[0]. Another Mike Judge's gift to us.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo

It's funny, before I starting working as a developer I thought this guy was useless, but now I understand how valuable not having to deal with the customers actually is.

It’s also one of those jobs that is hard to measure the performance of.

As much as we make fun of the new Agile/Startup/SV world, it looks like I'd absolutely dread work on a 90's Software company (though granted this is exagerated for comedic purposes).

In the startup I worked at in college, one of the most visible jobs our CEO did was talking with investors to get the next round of funding. He was also the top-level business strategy guy (for an example in a more mature company, look at the difference Nadella made to Microsoft's strategy relative to Ballmer), although implementation details were delegated to other roles (that he was responsible for hiring).

The main job of the CEO is to manage the board of directors (i.e. the shareholders). And the main job of the board of directors is to decide when to fire the CEO.

> The main job of the CEO is to manage the board of directors (i.e. the shareholders).

Uh, no. Dealing with the board is indeed part of the job for the CEO, but a relatively small part unless you're doing poorly.

The CEO is also managing the direction of the company, and managing the top-level managers of the various departments. The CEO has to fight the fires, and allocate limited resources to where they are needed across all departments.

You're right, but I think parent was joking

Half-joking, but yeah. "Managing the board of directors" of course means keeping the board happy, which is done by what ansible wrote. Not just directly trying to talk them out of firing the CEO.

Of course. Jokes aren't funny if they aren't at least a little bit true!

He's the Chief Enthusiasm Officer:

> Peloton has been horribly mismanaged, with unbridled enthusiasm taking the place of disciplined leadership

Marketing and sales

How can you do Marketing without looking at the curre t development to Merker the new features?

How can you do sales without feeding customer feedback back into development?

How can you do all that without looking at the numbers to see what you can afford?

I don't know anything about Peloton, but my impression is that they're selling a way of life much more than a device with a particular set of features.

On the CEO level, marketing and sales might very much be all about mood, positioning, culture etc and very little about the display pixel density or the logistics.

I'm not saying that this is sensible, I'm just saying that lots of companies are run this way and a CEO saying they don't sync with tech nor finance every day doesn't necessarily disqualify them.

This guy built a pretty big company pretty fast so he's gotta have done something right. Maybe let's not go all-in with an activist investor's cherry-picked quotes of an uncommonly honest/humble CEO.

I've seen many times sellers selling things that didn't exist yet. Maybe a term describing that is Market Development. It doesn't end well every time but there is usually time to cope with customers after they signed a contract.

> How can you do Marketing without looking at the curre t development to Merker the new features?

Marketing shit that’s not out is just barely better than marketing shit that’s not even planned.

> How can you do sales without feeding customer feedback back into development?

Surely you have normal channels for doing that and it doesn’t require the CEO to talk to the CTO?

Isnt that called 'business development' at the C-level?

The deck also calls out another interview where he said he does very interviews (meaning hiring decisions). The deck also calls out that he gave an executive role to his wife.

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