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Comment by gavinray | Hacker News Reader

It might come off as trite, but I genuinely am sorry that things didn't pan out for you

Very early in my career I used to believe that I or anyone else could be a CEO.

It wasn't until working with tiny teams where the CEO/founders devoted everything in their life to the business -- often at the expense of hobbies, romantic relationships, and any shred of free time -- that I realized true CEOs are a rare breed.

When are you ask things like "what happens if the product fails?" the answer would always be "It won't."

They both relentlessly believe in, and put every ounce of energy toward, their vision because anything less would not suffice

Again as trite as it sounds, I empathize with these people in that to them losing their vision felt like losing something dearest to them

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There’s a fallacy that successful companies are only successful because their CEO was a “rare breed” and that failed companies fail because their CEO didn’t have some innate quality.

This isn’t true. It’s easily shown to be not true by looking at all of the CEOs who had success with one endeavor and then failed all of their following startups, or the other way around.

A lot goes into founding a successful company. Not all of it is in anyone’s control. Not everything can be overcome by a CEO with powerful motivation.

Some times the market moves in ways nobody could have expected. I even worked at one startup that was destabilized and ultimately failed due to a natural disaster.

Looking back at the startups in my past, some of the worst CEOs were the ones who paraded around their ideals about failure not being an option or who pretended that they could get the company through anything through sheer force of their will and the power of their dream. One CEO who was all about “never give up, never surrender!” thinking ran the company into the ground because he refused to let us pivot after the initial idea didn’t get traction in the market but some other features were getting a lot of interest.

Some times knowing when to call it, move on to the next thing, and stop stringing your employees, investors, and customers along is an important CEO skill.

I know one who spends the days seemingly not doing antthing. He spends like a month with his own thoughts and comes up with truly bizare things that work.

In one instance he raised the price of something by 1000 times without adding anything extra. His explaination was that it would build the right community. In his opinion people were to negative/sceptical and talked to much about what things cost.

Cost him 90% of the customers innitially then grew by 100ish%. As if some high end comedy the 90% said it was to expensive and that it would never work. The other 10% really needed to see what would happen.

what do you mean a true "CEO"? Obviously there is a big difference between what someone like Satya Nadella does and what a CEO of a 10-person firm does.

In smaller startups, everyone is directly involved and has to punch above their weight to pull through, not just the CEO.

Also devoting everything in your life to one thing is not a mark of intelligence or skill. It is a mark of dedication but by itself means little.

And yeah, not everyone can be a CEO because most business fail very quickly. There is always an element of luck in those that survive.

But the idea that you devote 24x7 of your life hence you must be a good leader is not accurate. In fact, if you press this culture downstream, you'll tire your workers and the rest of the team.

There are personality traits inherent to successful CEO's that are in-born.

For example: I cannot imagine being a successful touring live performer. I am an introvert, I keep a rigid schedule so travel throws everything off, can't keep myself awake very late...

Could I perform the functions of a live performer? Yes, though no matter how much I "tried" the mismatch between the job and my natural tendencies is a recipe for failure.

  > not everyone can be a CEO because most business fail very quickly

Not everyone can be a CEO because not everyone is cut out for it. If you think you could step into those shoes, you're either built different or delusional.

> For example: I cannot imagine being a successful touring live performer. I am an introvert, I keep a rigid schedule so travel throws everything off, can't keep myself awake very late...

These are not examples of in-born traits. While I agree that not everyone has the motivation to become a CEO, I would disagree that a person cannot learn and adapt.

well, actually - https://introvertdear.com/news/are-you-born-an-introvert-or-...

I've known introverts that were performing musicians.

> If you think you could step into those shoes, you're either built different or delusional.

Being a bit delusional is a critical quality of some CEOs, so the distinction hardly matters.

> There are personality traits inherent to successful CEO's that are in-born.

The problem with your point of view is that "Love of cocaine" is one of them, it's near the top, and you'll never acknowledge the fact.

> > There are personality traits inherent to successful CEO's that are in-born.

> The problem with your point of view is that "Love of cocaine" is one of them, it's near the top, and you'll never acknowledge the fact.

I don't get why one can't easily acknowledge the slightly weaker statement that traits that are inherent to successful CEOs might be positively correlated to being prone to a love for cocaine (which says nothing about any causality).

This is the problem. You’re thinking academic hypothesis and I’m thinking historical fact.

CEOs will often have unfavorable characteristics. From startups to billion dollar corporations I've experienced far fewer "genuine" CEOs than narcissistic assholes. The latter are so prevalent because they take the valuation of the company as one of their primary drivers. This means that, for them, removing any obstacle (customers included) is the path they will traverse.

I think the problems with "successful" CEOs don't paint the complete picture. Many CEOs come in after the hard work has been done and "final phase" CEOs enshittify the product and treat their partners and customers vastly differently than they did during their build phase. I experienced this first hand at Palo Alto Networks. At the time their second CEO (Mark McLaughlin) had just come into the org. Mark was one of those few genuine CEOs I experienced, probably one of the least narcissistic I've seen at that point in a young company's trajectory. However Nikesh Arora (Mark's successor) is a complete narcissistic asshole. I still talk to many in leadership there on the regular and the consistent theme is he's surely the reason PAN support and product quality has taken a dive compared to the engineering focus on product and customers back in the early 2010s.

There are a lot of papers surrounding CEOs and many look at the narcissistic angle [0][1][2]. The reality is a lot of these companies could operate just fine without a CEO. I find it hard to believe CEOs are even remotely worth their compensation packages given most of them have zero clue about the product or customs they serve anymore. This all flows back to the "shareholder value" bullshit the US economy is built on. If corporations had more restrictions in financial engineering maybe, just maybe, they'd actually try to better compete within their product/service space.

[0] https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/publications/n... [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0149206319892678 [2] https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/10/25/are-narcissistic-...

True CEO. An actual leader who takes responsibility.

I.e. Not the majority of celebrity CEOs with golden parachutes and underpaid employees. Only in the position thanks to "my dad knows his dad and we went to the same school" nods and winks. It is the objective truth for most executives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

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