The Rise of the Technical CEO

I recently had the opportunity to present Cobot to Jensen Huang at NVIDIA. I've listened to a lot of his podcasts and studied the history of NVIDIA, but I had missed something in those podcasts.

When CEOs and leaders talk about the history of their companies or their philosophy on leadership or their vision for the future, they tend to talk about crucible moments surrounding critical decisions. Sequoia's appropriate-named new podcast "Crucible Moments" has an excellent interview with Jensen. That's not surprising as these stories are illuminating and interesting.

At the highest levels, all of these leaders speak technology and innovation. You simply have to if you're leading a transformative company.

What's often missing in those stories is insight into these CEO's true areas of deep domain knowledge. Tim Cook is famously an expert in supply chain management. Steve Ballmer is known as a master strategist in business and sales. Indra Nooyi worked in consulting and strategy. Meg Whitman was a brand and marketing strategist. Jeff Wilke was a chemical engineer.

At the highest levels, all of these leaders speak technology and innovation. You simply have to if you're leading a transformative company.

What stood out to me meeting Jensen was that Jensen is an engineer by background and a deeply technical one at that. Jensen's background is in electrical engineering and computer science, having worked as an engineer doing chip design for LSI Logic where they were building compilers to design chips.

Highly technical CEOs are likely to have an edge in their ability to understand the transformative impact of this technology, the aggressive level of investment needed, and the technical details of where the bottlenecks will emerge

Jensen's questions to me and other founders were similar in depth and technical richness as the questions Distinguished Engineers at Amazon or Fellows at Google often ask. The sophistication in the way he asked his questions reminded me of John Giannandrea, Apple's SVP of AI, and James Hamilton, Amazon's Distinguished Engineer for AWS. Both John and James are incredible in their ability to operate from a 50,000ft view of technology all the way down to the silicon or the perceptron.

I think there's more to this story though than just how impressed I was by Jensen. I think with the AI revolution, we're beginning to see the rise of the technical CEO.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella, who has a deep background in CS, had the insight to make a bold bet on OpenAI. Nor should we be surprised that Bill Gates, who studied CS at Harvard, was heavily involved in that strategic move. Or that Sergei Brin, who dropped out before receiving his PhD in CS from Stanford, has been writing code for Google's latest Gemini LLM.

But at the highest levels of business, often operational expertise and business experience are considered even more critical than technical background.

Highly technical CEOs are likely to have an edge in their ability to understand the transformative impact of this technology, the aggressive level of investment needed, and the technical details of where the bottlenecks will emerge better than leaders traditionally steeped in operations, business development, or finance. A small edge in a fast-growing field can separate the winners from the losers.

Silicon Valley has a rich history of investing behind young founders with a background in computer science. Mark Zuckerberg studied CS at Harvard. Jeff Bezos studied CS at Princeton. Drew Houston studied CS at MIT. Technical founders often have an edge in identifying and attracting other strong engineers, which in the intense talent competition during the internet rush provided a significant advantage to their startups.

I wouldn't be surprised if we see Boards increasingly hiring and elevating highly technical CEOs.

But at the highest levels of business, often operational expertise and business experience are considered even more critical than technical background. Jim Barksdale was hired as CEO of Netscape because of his business and management experience.

I wonder if that will shift as the world goes through a rapid AI transformation and a robotic explosion, where leaders are increasingly overseeing large budgets for compute and automation. I wouldn't be surprised if we see Boards increasingly hiring and elevating highly technical CEOs. Marissa Mayer, recruited to run Yahoo!, studied CS at Stanford specializing in AI. Aicha Evans, recruited to be CEO of Zoox, holds a degree in computer engineering from The George Washington University. I expect this trend to continue.

I'm excited for that future!