If you look, there are actually plenty of examples of professional management or 'bean counter' types taking over companies and running them more successfully than their former tech-oriented management. And also, plenty of examples of tech-oriented management ruining a good thing. But those kinds of stories don't get very good play on Hacker News.
(ducks to avoid storm of thrown shoes and knives)
- Steve Ballmer @ Microsoft
- Tim Cook @ Apple
- Sundar Pichai @ Google (MechE by education)
- Elon Musk @ Tesla (he is not an auto engineer, so functions as the monied management)
There are a lot more examples out there. However, recent vintages of tech unicorns have been slower to replace founders in part due to dual-class stock structures that can give founders final veto over shareholder actions.
"Just" is doing some heavy lifting there, as if it's "just" easy to run a trillion-dollar company with tens of thousands of employees spread around the globe.
It's tech & tech changes fast. It would be relatively easy to generate a list of companies that had massive growth momentum that then stumbled when handed off to new management. All of those businesses have faced serious challenges (most recently: the pandemic & high inflation), and their managements have performed well nonetheless.
I chose these leaders specifically because their tenures saw their companies earn tons more money than when the founders were in charge.
For example: Jobs was visionary, but Cook's tenure has seen the launch/expansion of the Wearables segment and the Services segment. Those two are "only" a minority of Apple's revenues, but together form a business larger than Comcast or Meta or Target. Tech people won't give Cook credit for that accomplishment, but that's the point of this thread. :-)
The time scale that success is defined on is important here.
The root of the issue seems to be that manager types don't view profit as the market's reward for making a good product; they view it as the product itself.
If a product's quality is sufficiently high to begin with this can be great.
Once quality dips to the point where it softens demand though, it can be the beginning of the death spiral [0] (tl;dr: when production chases revenue downwards and the company suffocates under its fixed costs), and market perception/demand lags cost-cutting product changes so the causes and effects can be very difficult to link through financials alone.
[0] https://www.accountingcoach.com/blog/what-is-the-death-spira...