Kind of disagree, CEO - Should be from more from Sales than Tech/Finance.
As CEO's main job is to get more money, get new partnerships in place, etc.
founders/products architects can be Tech/Finance.
As CEO's main job is to get more money, get new partnerships in place, etc.
founders/products architects can be Tech/Finance.
Sales is tough, very valuable and absolutely crucial to almost every organization.
But...
If a CEO doesn't present a technical advantage or cannot model their own company financially, they can probably only grow it so big.
That being said, some sales CEOs are great for maintaining a business:
Intel's CEO, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otellini Otellini is one of the few CEO's in America that came from a sales background. I would argue that he is also very strong in finance and strong technically in the sense that he understands how the pieces go together.
My point is that it is always dangerous to generalize, but I don't see how someone can grow a business successfully and not have a deep understanding of finance. Understanding how decisions impact profitability and balance sheets is crucial to making good decisions.
Not having that background is like trying to win a game without knowing the rules.
It takes years to design and tool a fab to build a new chip. Intel started the R&D process years ago to maximize battery life. But, soon they will be in lots of phones and tablets.
The part of Intel/SoC/iPad/Tablet/Phone world that people don't understand is that there is almost no profit in making low end phone chips. At $35-$45 gross per chip, they only make a few dollars in profit.
A high end i7 processor probably achieves profitability in the $700+ per chip sold range.
That means they need to sell roughly (round numbers) $700/$5 = 140 smart phone chips to make the profitability from one high end computer chip.
No one is going to try to compete with AMD/Intel on the high end since there just isn't room for a competitor and the R&D risk is too high.
For Intel, they need to get in phones and tablets for the extra profit because they can, but there isn't that much there.
Whether Otellini has done the right thing or not is yet to be seen, but I would bet that Intel will start getting design wins in the next few years and will eventually become the dominate phone processor seller.
Intel isn't going away, but it's going to have some rough times.
http://www.sap.com/corporate-en/our-company/executives/mcder...