What are some good examples?
- 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.
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. :-)
"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.