No I think for the last 10-15 years, ivy types could legitimately just raise series A type money, run a company like shit, but capital was a moat and so ended up as CEOs.
This is actually how the world works
No I think for the last 10-15 years, ivy types could legitimately just raise series A type money, run a company like shit, but capital was a moat and so ended up as CEOs.
This is actually how the world works
"This is actually how the world works"
The level to which our algorithmic feeds have made us so confidently wrong about things is so deeply problematic. Tech's original sin keeps biting us back. This rampant cynicism and nihilism borne from constant bombardment of headlines has us acting like we know the personal stories of all leadership all around the world, and it's deeply damaging to our trust in the system.
Plenty of Ivy League leaders quietly working away at their job, doing the best they can with great results and no one to write about them and you'll never hear about it anywhere. This is obvious to anyone on a second thought, but the first reactionary thought is what's acted on...always.
my comments are from living in nyc for 15 years, alot of lived experience and meeting people behind closed doors
I was part of a company that was doing 10s of M in revenue, a few hundred employees, and had the technical prowess and IP to become a multi billion unicorn but the blue blood CEO was so clueless that he lost literally his entire technical core staff to incredible mismanagement. My favorite memory of him, and this sounds like a fake anecdote, is that on a big emergency call where he was pulling a huge amount of engineers and project managers off an account that was on fire to help with an account that was even more on fire (thus depriving the original account of labor and guaranteeing it would be in the same state in a few weeks), he spent 5 minutes talking about the chartered fishing trip he was on in Canada and then asked the audience if anyone and any plans for the weekend. Someone spoke up and said "yeah, I'll be working."
Sure, but his equity award deadline had passed, thus the fishing trip. And if things go well with Everett on the trip, the new funding would mean he can ditch those risky accounts.
But have you been inside the old money, prep school world? It is absolutely about connections and getting into the system for the most part. The meritocracy bootstrap stuff is life coaching fluff to keep us in the middle grinding.
I'd argue that the "rampant cynicism and nihilism" and more a result of the environment than algorithms manipulating people, the content is also made by other people, and it just serves up what people want. Your feed is often just a reflection of what you're feeling since everyone has their own feed instead of the reddit or HN approach with a shared feed. Also the phrase is that a few bad apples spoil the batch, nobody cares about the rest of the batch until you can get rid of the bad ones
I'm much more a descriptivist than prescriptivist so if there's a pattern among people I'm inclined to think it's a true issue instead of people just thinking "wrong" en-masse
"Your feed is often just a reflection of what you're feeling"
No it is not. The feed is optimized for what will increase the intensity of feelings, and bad feelings are more easily optimized than good. Meta (patient zero for this nonsense) has pretty much said so, multiple times.
" more a result of the environment than algorithms"
What environment? People are sitting on their algorithms for 100x more time than any physical environment.
i dont think hating on ivy league types is that common, and 90% of people have no real life experience with this kind of thing, or are even aware of how corporate hiring/funding works at the higher level.
You are confusing CEO pay with CEO ability. There is plenty of examples of companies doing poorly until a new CEO comes in, and others of a company doing well until the CEO retires and a replacement comes in.
Ivy types have a poor history of figuring out which is which in advance though.
no its not like that, these people get plopped into positions of power, and alot of time theres no good way to assess their performance
There are plenty of good ways to assess performance of CEO. However the important ones can only be run 10-20 years from now and so they are not helpful.
Is there? I don't see many control group companies working in absence of a CEO.
Right it’s like venture investing c very hard to evaluate short term
I think it's the other way around. They're not talking about CEO ability, they're talking about CEO performance, which aren't the same. Money follows performance (based on outcomes, not actual talent). It's like professional sports - win a championship, get a big payday, regardless of how it happened.
No, the only thing that matters is what you can negotiate. Since most executives + board vote on their own salaries, which ones have you ever seen negotiated to lower their salaries?
It's an extreme abuse of power, especially since workers are the sole reason why a company is able to succeed or not and they don't get the same privileges as a board + executive.
Not too mention most corporations + startups are setup to encourage the worse forms of human collaboration (dictatorships + centrally planned economies).
There's an equally valid hypothesis that a "good" CEO is just one that keeps their hands off the levers of power, doesn't rock the boat or fuck anything up, and quietly lets a good company perform; whereas a bad CEO is one who, due to ego and self-aggrandizement, can't help but impose themselves via meddling and prevent a good company from performing. By that measure, you might as well save yourself the executive compensation and potential for disaster by just not having a CEO at all, despite what the executive class would have you believe. The aristocracy of old also argued that their titles were earned and that society could not function without them.
Warren Buffet has always said that he likes to invest in businesses that are so great that even an idiot can run them (because often an idiot will be running them).
Any company that is thrashing around, constantly changing priorities, executive turnover, lots of layoffs is obviously being poorly run, yet this is typically exactly what happens when a new CEO is bought in to fix whatever was ailing before: the almost inevitable new-CEO plan: fire executives, bring in past cronies, have a few layoffs (because he's a tough guy, making those tough decisions), and change company priorities. Rinse and repeat - in a few years there'll be a new CEO coming in and doing the same again.
> a "good" CEO is just one that keeps their hands off the levers of power, doesn't rock the boat or fuck anything up, and quietly lets a good company perform
How can you tell if a company is good? Because trillions of dollars are spent by banks, private equity, hedge funds, and others truing to figure out if a company is "good."
> By that measure, you might as well save yourself the executive compensation and potential for disaster by just not having a CEO at all
Sure, but somebody is still making the decisions the CEO would have otherwise made. Maybe it's a good thing that the power isn't concentrated in one person; I'd be open to that. But you now have to trust that each department head is making good decisions. That's fine if they were already making good decisions, hit it's disastrous if they weren't.
> But you now have to trust that each department head is making good decisions.
There is a lot of evidence that corporate mergers destroy value.
What if... they were disintermediated by markets instead of being one company?
There are tons of reasons why companies exist (the whole Theory of the Firm line of research), but the information asymmetry barriers are constantly coming down.
There are plenty of anecdotal examples of co-CEOs not working very well.
Nah.
We know what good looks like in financial results and reputation. It's really not that complicated.
The rest of that bullshit isn't about evaluating a working company, it's about gamblers gambling on non-companies before they become real companies.
Sure, a college student can tell you if a company is making or losing money. But there are ample examples of "good" companies crashing because they didn't react to shifts in the market, which requires projecting into the future.
Blockbuster was good until it wasn't. Sears was good until it wasn't. Barnes and Noble was good, then it fell apart, and now it's good again. The lesson to learn is that by the time your financials say things are taking a turn, you're a year to multiple years late to start fixing the problem.
Yes, sometimes a healthy company will eventually have their business undermined by some future technology.
Except that's not what we were discussing.
And in truth it's a paradox. The better a company is (generally correlated to an empowered workforce with a sense of agency and purpose), the harder it is to extract profit for the capitalist class.
Which helps explain the "need" for CEOs to meddle.
yeah just sit there, keep a steady hand, and project confidence
There are a lot of well-functioning organizations for which that’s exactly what’s needed.
Leaders should be paid for outcomes not activities.
Outcomes of leadership are hard to measure.
If you pay by success of the company, noone is going to want to do a 5 year corporate turnaround.
In the startup world they're only really looking to bat better than 10 pct overall to mark success, right? Do we wonder why it's all just a crap shoot?
Investors aren't dumb. What does Ivy gain in this trade by just raising a lot of money and running it poorly?
You think he can raise a huge round and just decide to pay himself $20m a year?
Capital is not a moat. There are entire industries (VC, PE, Banks, etc) that are looking to write checks. Nothing would make them happier than to give you money, under the condition that there is significant upside (more VC) or assets (PE, Banks) and you commit to doing the hard work for very little pay.
This is actually how the world works.
the world doesnt work like an efficient machine, and capital is far more of a moat than people want to admit. these "founders" are more like professional managers from the same backgrounds as the investors
there is alot of beta involved, i.e. put 10M into payroll startup xyz, expect some rate of return.
Saying capital is a moat is not convincing.
From the vast amount of VC money going around, nearly half a trillion expected in 2026, not including other forms of funding, it's safe to say that there is a lot of capital for people that can execute.
I don't see how you can translate money to product/startup success. You think there's some magic lever you can press to get people to use your product? Selling $10 for $5 and building a market like that is rare (moviepass) but even that is incredibly difficult. Advertising is very inefficient and sales is hard.
https://dealroom.co/guides/global
Assuming he doesn’t completely shit the bed he can spin any mediocre tenure into a great success and now he has experience running a company.
> Investors aren't dumb.
They are not dumb, just incompetent in the domains where they invest the money. And surrounded by yes-men because they are the ones writing the checks.
Dammit! Why am I the only 'Ivy type' that cannot raise a round?!!! .
It's who you know. You are just more likely to know the right people to raise money than a random non-Ivy type.
you messed up!