Hacker News Reader

Comment by NohatCoder | Hacker News Reader

It is beyond me how a CEO can serve at any board, at all, let alone the CEO of one billion dollar corporation serving at the board of another billion dollar corporation.

There are potential issues with non-compete agreements, any and all deals between the companies, hiring and compensation of executives, board members actually having the time to do the job of a board member, and or course also sensitive information leaking to where it shouldn't.

View on HN

From one viewpoint, this is akin to a king marrying off his children to a rival kingdom.

Having your CEO on the board of another company helps drive alignment and collaboration. It’s a solid business strategy.

Sometime it drives long term alignment. Other times you end up letting a fox in the henhouse. In this case it sounds like Eric Schmidt was a fox.

But neither of those outcomes is desirable from a wider viewpoint. Society doesn’t benefit from companies only innovating by stealing from each other, nor does it benefit from active collusion.

Active collusion - right. Companies stealing from one another? I think it can be argued that the consumer benefits from corporations imitating the good ideas of other corporations. A world with Android and iOS is better than a world only with iOS.

Executives usually have quite a bit of leverage and have multiple ways of retaliating against a company, typically in the form of a lawsuit and dragging it on for years.

This is also the reason why C-suites are given "golden parachutes", because firing them may end up triggering a lengthy legal battle that neither party benefits from.

Silicon Valley has a much looser definition of conflict of interest than most other industries.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com