CEOs manage to fail upwards their entire career, I don't suspect this will be any different. Just some "nerds on a forum" who got annoyed with his personal decisions.
The vast majority of projects seem to not meet their stated goals or KPIs or mission, be late, not follow remotely the planned path, etc. Whether blame falls on poor execution, poor planning, or overpromsing, those are precisely the things that chosen leaders are supposed to have been chosen to avoid—and what they would in theory fail downwards for. Unpredictable things do happen, but the regularity of these outcomes for projects (and products as a whole) means we're systematically choosing the wrong ones, there aren't enough capable ones (period), and/or that we shouldn't be org'd to need them in the first place. The last one is simply saying that if the environment is unpredictable enough that you can't plan well, then let's not spend time and money on planning. That in itself axes large chunks of the things product leaders do before work starts.
It makes iterating a more likely plan, but most teams and workstreams don't iterate too much. The iterating that sometimes is done is typically downstream of the plan, strategy, architecture that leadership leadershipped. They might do better without all the planning and overpromised timelines, which gut iterating. Iteration is only sort of a strategy anyhow (depends on what layer we're talking about when we say strategy). Iteration is what hedges a lack of vision.
Citation needed
Yes, but there are valid reasons for this. Speaking as someone who is currently in Product, let me point out that a lot of larger efforts in large organizations are inherently risky. This is probably measurable, but generally nobody invests in doing so, rather than that we model it with approximations. When an executive decides on a strategy which has a large effort as a downstream outcome, there is some risk possible that it becomes impossible, or that it is possible but at 2x, 3x, 5x, 10x the cost/time which erodes its value. Success doesn't look like hitting an arbitrary timeline or budget, success looks like getting to an outcome that aligns with the objectives/goals of the strategy, in a timeline that doesn't torpedo the strategy, and in a way which results in an economic ROI.
I am generally considered pretty good in my current organization. I have been lauded often. I don't think any of the major initiatives I've worked on have been "on time", but in almost every case it was due to cross-organizational dependencies dragging things out, which is an inherent risk accounted for when doing anything large in a large organization. But every single one of those initiatives has resulted in a positive ROI in a manner timely enough to support the strategy.
From the perspective of the organization, that's a win. And a win is rewarded.
I imagine similar things can be seen at executive levels. Nobody is asking detailed execution questions about your strategy to determine if its a win or a loss, they're looking at the aggregate outcome. Did your strategy result in improved profitability or reduction of cost or increase in share price, or not? CEOs seem to fail upward even on those metrics, but other executive roles seem to be more accountable.
Another example: current CEO of Cerebras, is an SEC felon from a prior company (for cooking the books), and now he's CEO of a public company.
It came back with Bob Komin.
"failed up" is currently defined as founding a company that goes public and being its CEO. I'd love to know what success is.
these stands do better than cerebras, which is an 11 year old deeply unprofitable company building a technology that no other company has bothered to try to even get close to replicating.
This is why their API has dumb limits on it. I'd estimate their $/tok cost around $4-5000/mtok based on hardware alone, which is insane. Sure, it is fast, but if it is heavily quanted, expensive, and can't scale, you're going to be in a world of pain.
They've pivoted many times over the years trying to make "wafer scale" work in a variety of use cases, and they still haven't gotten it right.
By the way, the CTO is dumping stock left and right and the stock is down nearly 5% today alone...
https://www.marketbeat.com/instant-alerts/insider-cerebras-s...
> how has cerebras not gotten their chip right?
It doesn't scale, and won't ever be profitable. They pivoted to inference, which has the unfortunate (for them) side effect of also requiring a boat load of memory. This is why they just partnered with AMD to offload onto their chips.
> I use cerebras.ai the token rate is amazing
Ah, investor. Explains your responses.
it kind of is, relatively - sean might just be having a galaxy blackhole supercluster installed at home for all we know
> It doesn't scale .. They pivoted to inference
they have more options than non-wafer-scale solutions, the chips are going 3d and meanwhile they benefit from the same interconnect progress as the wholly memory-bound alternatives
> Ah, investor. Explains your responses.
physician heal thyself like your not out here tryna manifest your short
I hear that CS-420 will be amazing.
If I was a Cerebras shareholder, I would be LIVID right now. Seriously, what the hell. Insiders dumping stock: CFO, COO, accounting officer. AND NO INFO about losing GPT-6.1 Ultrafast.
Only needs to work once for him to get a passive payoff. Sitting in your lane usually doesn't buy you that.
(I'd ask some LLM to research it but the people who would be doubtful it's false significantly overlap with the people who distrust LLMs, so I'll just leave this as a random guess and nothing more.)
You have some startup, the founder is either young or doesn't want to do the CEO stuff. Things kind of eek along until the founder either steps aside or is removed by the board because a) it's time for a "grown-up" CEO; b) the CEO needs real sales experience; c) the founder overpromised and under-delivered; d) board/VC politics make it helpful to install a buddy as CEO; e) etc.
Then the CEO clock starts, typically they have 18 months to get lucky and hit their metrics. They do a lot of glad-handing. They hire "their team" of sales/marketing/etc people. They spend A LOT of money. And I mean A LOT. They talk about OKRs or SMRTs and KPIs. Out of nowhere a small army of project managers show up and try to tell you how to do your job and why you can't just talk to the <thing X> team directly but have to go through them for "efficiency" and "visibility."
In 3-6 months, senior engineering and R&D staff starts to leave. Whatever culture you had slips away. HR has "culture" meetings to "find the right company culture."
Sales/product can't sell and points the finger at R&D, maybe even for the right reasons. You OKR/KPI harder, but it doesn't matter because nothing addresses whatever the underlying problem is. Multiple senior people have pointed loudly to the problem and are ignored; they're often not managers so it's unclear if they were even heard.
At some point there are one or more rounds of layoffs; sometimes these are announced, sometimes it's just a gradual attrition.
Eventually the CEO clock runs out. They don't get lucky. Nothing they did helped, and some of it hurt. They collect their $1M severance, get to keep their stock, get 9-12 months of health insurance, and move on. In a year or two you hear about them joining a new company as CEO.
In the meantime, you've either moved on or have a new CEO with a new 18-month clock.
Even if it’s only 30% of CEOs and 15% of other CxOs there’s still an anomaly there to be explained.
That would actually be interesting if LLMs were to ever refer to LLM trust in the way I did. Kind of a scary thought.