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But a lot of "proven" talent with a huge price tag is also no good, really achieved what they did elsewhere due to sheer luck/help from a product that couldn't go wrong, and will drag you into a hole with their comp. I have seen this over and over again: Big pedigree, top of the line personality, zero results.

Everyone thinks they are hiring the star, not the fraudster, or just the lucky one. That's how we end up with overpaid execs.

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

That's only if the company's revenue is in excess of 100B. There aren't many companies like that. Certainly not enough for an AI platform to monetize.

But don't you fall in the same trap as they try to lure you with: expressing a CEO's value as revenue/profit optimization? With that kind of logic, you should pivot your business, whatever it is, to whatever is looking more profitable in the short term. It's short-sighted. And it misses the ethical and social aspect of the organization that forms the company.

> speaking as a founder/CEO

> massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it

The "Obama putting a medal around Obama's neck" meme seems appropriate here.

I feel like you're suffering from some sort of confirmation bias.

I've worked under a top talent CEO, and the company collapsed. He made some gambles and they just didn't work out. I am not convinced that a third-rate version of him would have done significantly worse.

> Proven talent comes with a massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it.

Tall guy with good hair, smooth talker, in the same socio-economic circles, buddies with the board/investors, social drinker for networking, knows a lot about costly hobbies and 'interesting' experiences (pilot license, restores classic cars, has exotic car collection, golf) .....

Good leadership makes a huge difference - whether that be big or small. I've seen it myself - in particular it's amazing much of a difference good leadership can make at a huge company.

However at the same time it can also be true that some leaders are either poor or make no difference - but as long as they don't have to react to external change ( or only do so as part of a herd ) they can coast quite happily for years while 'earning' huge rewards.

Leadership is only really tested when the right course is a different one from either the past or your peers.

The problem is anyone can point to examples of good CEOs and bad CEOs. John Sculley and Rory Read also got paid a ton of money. It's not clear what you need to know a priori to actually pick a good CEO.

Proven talent like Carly Fiorina, Gerald Levin, and Ken Lay?

> Just look at Lisa Su or Steve Jobs.

It has a name, it's called "survivorship bias".

Like others have said - many people at the top are so successful because they ended up at the right place and right time, and their approach just fit exactly the problem at hand. They did not see the future, they just had a hunch - and that can go either way.

Put them anywhere else and it will be a disaster.

A good case study of this is Ron Johnson, who did miracles at Apple and then ran J.C. Penny into the ground.

If you look at the causes, it was blatantly obvious what he was doing wrong (doing away with sale prices). It's a kind of fundamental thing that one could understand by just asking some questions. Maybe it's not genius, maybe people "just do things" and they just happen to work once.

Most success stories are accidental, and one's ability to succeed really depends on how many times they are allowed to fail first.

Most of us here - we have no such luxury. We fail, we become homeless.

There are exceptions, of course, and there are truly talented managers out there. If I look around, however, all I see is clown cars accidentally driving into gold mines.

See, this is something I’ve had to reconcile: founders aren’t CEOs, and CEOs aren’t founders.

I remain unconvinced a CEO is needed in any real, modern capacity. A large enough company has a PR person (who can do the interviews and sell the messaging), an Ops person (who translates Board guidance into actionable work for specific teams and vice versa), a slew of specialty technical people, and a Board who generally sets the course for the firm.

The CEO claims to do all of those, but increasingly - especially in large or mature firms - they’re just public celebrities hoovering up revenue and making connections with other CEOs. It’s a multi-million dollar fleecing of corporate resources to support one dude’s luxury lifestyle. They’re not steering the business so much as making sure we scratch the backs of their buddies to make gameable KPIs look good to the Board, and in that context they’re easily tossed aside.

The site is satire… I don’t think it’s a serious pitch for “replace your CEO with AI”, it’s “hey, CEOs, if you disagree with this, why don’t you apply the same logic to all the parts of your business and all the employees you’ve confidently stated will be replaced by AI?”

But speaking as top talent, the quality gap between an average hire and me is night and day. I'm worth it.

Genuine questions from the ground floor:

How do you spot the quality candidates in those top roles? It seems like forecasting success is exponentially harder when the skills are so qualitative and contextual.

And I have not yet witnessed an organization that is comfortable with the risk of promoting an internal "nobody" relative to someone with plausible credentials or from outside. If you're stuck with MBA-type CEOs, how do you fix them or mitigate their damage from above?

I think there are parallels here to software development.

When starting a brand new project it’s better to have a lot of human involvement to make sure the AI is creating a foundation that actually matches requirements, both spoken and unspoken. But once the project reaches maturity it’s more realistic to imagine an AI working on top of that concrete layer.

So goes management. Bootstrapping a new company? Needs human involvement. A company just ticking along? I’m less convinced. Or to be more specific, as a developer who is told my work is obsolete by CEOs, I’m interested to know why they don’t apply the same logic inwards.

Good employees are good and bad employees are bad?

"proven talent"?

Steve jobs said the same thing. however, we need to define great talent. imo they are laser focused people who also love helping others.

unfortunately, have seen too much arrogance in corporate, and have always asked what if that person has been a humble guy?

"Top talent" - I'm curious, do you really believe this is a normal / proper / desirable way of talking about other people?

The same thing is true in software engineering: an AI model is equivalent to an average programer (average with a huge standard deviation). Averigua is better than half, but still way behind the top performers

Ars had an interesting story, yesterday: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/07/on-the-run-for-20-yea...

Looks like this guy was considered "proven," by his company. So much, so, that they didn't even bother checking his basic bona fides. Wouldn’t surprise me, if he was actually pretty good at his job.

I think a lot of the "proof" at this level, is Mastery of the Bro-Fu. If you can speak the right language, wear the right watch, and drive the right car, the key to the executive washroom is tossed to you, without a second thought.

I would like to replace a few CIOs or CTOs at some companies, software quality has been down the drain since before AI. It's just terrible. Stock market pricing driven development is a detriment on software quality.

I was never a "fanboy" of Jeff Bezos, but I do admire when people do or take the correct approach, I say that to preface that I admire that early on he would tell investors that he's only to be considered as a long term investment, which I wish the stock market had some way to protect these sorts of stocks from the whims of people who quickly crash the value of a company on speculation or other meaningless metrics when you're heavily investing in R&D and have one bad quarter, maybe two, but your third quarter will yield results, but oh no, you have to fire people to make the market happy, so your efforts are ruined.

What matters is their connections to powerful people. That's what you buy.

> Proven talent comes with a massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it.

How often is the only proof the price tag from their previous position?

Whoa there buddy, you are highlighting that true talent, like beauty, actually does exist. This kind of thinking is not tolerable on Hacker News.

Steve Jobs was a founder, not your average CEO hire. He built the company from scratch.

I'd feel better hearing this type of sentiment from someone with less vested interest in this type of sentiment.

Months? Most terrible founders and CEOs I've worked for set the company back years, and most of the time significantly damaged it to the point of no return for everyone involved. The worst ones are the arrogant, low-skill and/or low-effort bunch. They destroy the soul of the company, drive away customers, talent and loot whatever value is left in the company and take for themselves.

I respect your opinion, but behind winners imho there's 99% being in the right place at the right time. And people change and so do their motivation.

I'm not saying top talent doesn't make the difference, I'm just saying that CVs and impressions aren't always completely related.

> speaking as a founder/CEO [...] Proven talent comes with a massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it.

I see no bias here /s.

Unfortunately this is not what 95% of HN wants to hear, even though its the truth. But you have my upvote.

:D I see it as art, because we know it won't fly, but it is nice to dream.

Perhaps you've watched too many classic StarTrek episodes as a child and are channelling the Spock versus Kirk leadership theme.

I worked for five companies in two years about a decade ago (Pre retail Gen-AI). All of them had the exact same mission slide deck. Same goals, same priorities, same strategy.

I think the main strength of the AI is just that its schedule is not a constraint.

Anyone can get a decision now-ish, without filtering through tiers of middle management.

CEOs can definitely be "hacked" by scammers but I think the public will react differently when a large company puts a lot of control in the hands of AI and it is scammed with some kind of cognitive hack that people assume wouldn't work as well on expensive wetware.

tbh AI is great at vague strategic decision making with a low risk bias. I wouldn't mind working for Claude

A company should be judged on longer term metrics than one month. Often the best action is to take a loss for several months while you set the company up for long term success. Often is not always of course. If you take over at a soap manufacture there is unlikely to be much investment that would make a change in the companies performance - soap is a well understood product that has been around for many years and the processes to make it have been optimized for years (I'm sure there is room for improvement, but many will not pay off.)

What does this mean in practice? Surely no AI-managed company could become public by way of lack of accountability and governance.

You got it all wrong. You see, AGI (conveniently ignore the definition for now) might be able to replace everybody. In truth it will be uses by the C level to subjugate everybody else.

They should be, I see them as the prime targets for AI. Most of what they do is bullshit, they're often massively over paid, and AI will produce answers 100 times faster than they will.

Why would you be scared? I keep hearing about how this is the best time ever to be a programmer because typing everything out by hand is no longer necessary. (apparently a lot of AI fans never heard of code generators, but anyway)

> living in NYC, I have met a ton of harvard/yale "CEOs"

> they are absolutely clueless.

That's because you aren't asking them about their college rowing days, yachting, collecting weird mechanical wristwatches, equestrian sports, the best restaurants in the Hamptons or other matters on which they are uniquely suited for and qualified.

> With AI we do have the chance to return to meritocracy

No, you've identified the real issue: all the CEOs come from Harvard/Yale. There is a very large wealth class divide between the people who get these jobs almost exclusively due to "networking" (often failing upwards) and the increasingly rare people who actually work up to those roles. It's very much a club that uses every tool possible to maintain the opportunity hording, including AI.

This is largely because being an executive in 2026 has very, very, little to due with technical expertise. AI will just be another tool in their workshop for that.

Isn't AI just adding the slipperiest gated layer? I mean, we all agree AI can do their jobs, but that's not how power structures work.

> With AI we do have the chance to return to meritocracy

I think I am more inclined to believe the opposite of this

You have the causation wrong: The secret is growing up as a trust fund nepo kid with offshore money from colonialist activities of your grandparents.

The white-washing of stolen wealth via "self-made" hollywood and startup careers has reached unfathomable levels.

Yes, daddy worked for the US gov in the 70s and somehow we have eight-digit offshore wealth.

AI is (and already has) only going to make these kinds of problems worse.

Getting rid of those clever humans is the first step towards a meritocracy.

AI cannot replace CEO the same reason AI cannot replace your girlfriend.

> A big fraction of senior executives' work is vulnerable to replacement by AI.

A big fraction of a senior executives' work can also be delegated to others in the company (or outside consultants and services), the thing that can't is being ultimately responsible for making the final decisions - product, people, direction etc.

Hire a theater kid and put a knob in its ear.

In the 80s and early 90s, massive swaths of "middle management" were purged by Corporate America. Those managers have never returned. That's not CxO class of course, but these were 'executives'. Very well paid ones at the time, what might have been considered 'upper middle income'. Well-to-do.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DZWKGZGN Human Resources: A Tor Original by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Author)

An amusing take on it. Because it makes sense. It isn't the CEO that's the last to be fired. It's the HR guy, because you need HR until there's no one left to fire.

Oh don't worry, we know that CEOs don't execute any tasks.

getting them to admit they don't really do anything useful is kind of the point of the joke, right?

Yeah, gotta go to work and earn a dime to have something to eat, right? It would be great if someone paid for your living while you could just "enjoy life", right? Maybe those suckers who actually enjoy doing stuff and get paid in return.

Lumon is currently hiring new candidates willing to undergo severance :-)