Yeah, also drawing conclusions from just the top ten companies is silly. But how do software engineers do managing non-software companies? Elon Musk is doing well. I guess you could count Amazon as retail instead of software. What other examples are there?
Wow, talk about assuming correlation implies causation.
I think the obvious lesson here is when society becomes reoriented around a new field (in this case software), people with experience in that field are going to do well.
So true! Around 1980, chemical and petroleum engineers made the best CEOs, because oil prices were high and energy companies had the highest stock-market valuations.
Around 1990 Japanese finance majors made the best CEOs, because the Japanese financial markets were near their peak and Japanese bank stocks were highly valued.
This might be true but I don't see why it is obvious, especially when it's not even commonly assumed that the best person to run a software company is a software engineer.
I'm the author bawolff, and I completely agree that the success of software engineers as CEOs is correlation, not causation. The likely cause is that software engineers learn to discover value by running value experiments. Zuckerberg and Bezos are well known for their value experiments in production. I believe that the nature of pursuing new value, in effect, taught them this practice. And to the comment below, when it comes to oil, new value in the form of oil fields is also discovered. Prospecting for oil is one concrete form of the abstract pattern of discovering value, iterating in software is also prospecting for value. It's just that unlike oil, you can use software to prospect for all kinds of value very quickly.
If you gave a list of non-software companies that had software engineers as their CEOs, i'd give this some credence, but as is this is kind of rediculous when you have a giant elephant in the room confounding factor that you're pretending doesn't exist.
> Prospecting for oil is one concrete form of the abstract pattern of discovering value
So is literally everything.
Police officer: discovering value by figuring out the right person to arrest
Doctor: discovering value by figuring out what disease.
Okay, but this is a function of the medium not of the people. Crafting successful feedback loops has defined great leaders across industries for hundred(s) of years. A bent toward experimentation is not something that software engineers possess. It's a trait that great leaders build into their businesses.
In my circles, I see little to no experimentation done in the computer field, much to my dismay. We already have the best simulator for the universe, itself.
Totally agree. One redeeming truth is that software is similar to finance in that it gives an outsized advantage to a business vs one that doesn't get it. Unlike finance though, "softwarizing" a company is a much more drastic transformation than having a finance team and most business can't level up. It so happens that we're still at the early ages of that process and thus the "tech company" distinction still exists. In the future all big companies will be "tech companies" in that sense. (Marc was right)
Does anyone find this methodology lazy, if not disingenuous?
- Google/Alphabet's current CEO is a materials engineer [0]
- Apple's current CEO is an MBA with a degree in industrial engineering [1]. Jobs, the founding CEO, was also not a software engineer.
- Amazon's CEO, Bezos, was a software engineer [2], but it's widely known that he didn't do programming work for Amazon. I don't think he would consider himself a "software engineer" today. There is a HN regular who was an early Amazon employee and has talked about this (his name now escapes me).
That makes 7/10 of the "top 10" companies in this chart headed by non-software-engineer CEOs!!!
Yeah, but that doesn't make him a software engineer. And he never practiced as an engineer either [0]. I know plenty of people with physics degrees who ended up in accounting and people with arts degrees who ended up in software. Your degree doesn't determine your career or what you actually end up doing.
[0]: From Cook's Wikipedia article: After graduating from Auburn University, Cook spent 12 years in IBM's personal computer business, ultimately serving as the director of North American fulfillment.
Also, needless to say, Jobs was not a software engineer either.
Sorry to have to ask this, but did you read the article? It explicitly addresses this.
> *Wozniak obtained a master’s in computer science in 1987 and does code. Though Jobs was brilliant and technically savvy, Jobs clearly didn’t professionally code; he did contribute to creative and technical designs
Yes, I did, which is why I find it so disingenuous. I mean, looking at their chart, 7/10 do not have software engineer CEOs. And Wozniak was never CEO of Apple.
"Contributing to creative and technical designs" does not make you a software engineer. LOL. Might as well give my grandmother the moniker as well (she's contributed to some creative designs for my startup).
--
Also, it's a terribly written article. I mean, this is content-marketing level, https://shortlyai.com type of stuff.
> Conversely, traditional CEOs are regularly incentivized and seduced into pleasing financial markets by having higher returns in the near term. This typically overhyped mission of “improved earnings” occasionally results in companies pursuing unsustainable schemes that are focused on boosting quarterly profits (liquid value).
Software engineer CEOs do this exact same thing, probably more so! (Mostly as an artifact of their Silicon Valley VC investors pumping them into SPACs and IPOs to get a fat payday.)
They paint a picture of non-software-engineer CEOs as idiots, which is completely idiotic. Most successful companies throughout history have not been founded by software engineers. This is a recent phenomenon and the article's author(s) have no idea what they're talking about.
Co-founder has nothing to do with CEO. Clearly Wozniak was the technical co-founder, not the business co-founder. I have never seen any hint of him being anything but terrible at business.
In a small company, every person has enough influence to rival the CEO and every role overlaps enough that the distinction given by titles is meaningless inside the company. Mainly the distinction given by titles determines how people market themselves outside the company where the dividing roles will appear clear for marketing purposes, which they are not in reality.
"Getting an MBA does not make you not-an-engineer."
My view having known quite a few engineers who got MBAs (outside of the software world) is that it very much marked a point where people had decided they wanted to stop being a practising engineer and wanted to be someone who managed practising engineers (directly or indirectly).
My view as a developer with an MBA is that I got it because the hardest problems I was facing were people/political/business problems rather than tech problems.
I was already managing a team before I got it. After I got it I've had a mix of roles as both engineer and manager. I didn't intend to switch track, it's more about being better at both tracks.
Regarding Alphabet, the article listed Sergey and Larry, arguably the leaders who oversaw google's meteoric rise. There is a note about Schmidt as well.
Pretty much same comment for Apple, it remains to be seen if Tim Cook is another Jobs/Gates or if he is instead a Ballmer.
Regarding Bezos, if you read the article you will find that you actually made the one of the major points in the article with your comment about Bezos.
> Regarding Alphabet, the article listed Sergey and Larry, arguably the leaders who oversaw google's meteoric rise.
Well, Sergey and Larry failed in writing their initial crawler in C (they even published a paper on how not to write a crawler in C), so paid a programmer to write it in python. I believe he became employee #1.
Then they should revise the title to "Software engineers make the best founders."
To your note on Bezos, the whole article makes no points about whether Bezos actually programmed or not, just that he thinks analytically and runs experiments. I mean, great for him! But this article isn't driven by any empirical data. Aside from its disingenuous claims about CEOs, it's a very emotionally written piece (doesn't feel like a software engineer wrote it ;).
I mean, read this:
> After much consideration, it would seem there are unseen forces derived from the nature of value itself that are biasing software engineering CEOs towards greater success, and the raw power of these forces appear to sculpt many of the successful practices of these leaders.
What???!??!? What does that mean???? "Derived from the nature of value itself ... the raw power of these forces ... sculpt many of the successful practices"
This reads like a college freshman's Business 101 term paper.
To your note on Bezos, this section of the article is what really juxtaposed nicely for me with your comment on Bezos not coding:
>So, obviously, those that understand the super infrastructure that is software have a competitive advantage over those that don’t. But, as these leaders move up, they aren’t actually the ones writing the software. So, what differentiates their management practices such that those under them are better able to create and scale value? Other forces must be at play, it’s not as simple as the company’s products and services are software based. In the next sections, we will drill into the value stages for likely causes.
I mean, he clearly isn't writing the code, but he also clearly understands how to run a software org based on him telling wall street that his team is working on a quarter 3 years out.
"Economic value is also theorized to be the universal organizing force of secular society, and the nature of value is thought to be responsible for the emergence of the three dominant value management systems, each having proceeded out of its own particular value state. Individual contributors are often attracted to a particular type of value, and they are therefore intrinsically motivated by the unique properties of that value type. Often, humans perceive their own value to society in terms of their ability to produce or replicate a thing of value such as a meal, or concert, or a manufactured good. Others might perceive their value in terms of their net worth, and creative individuals might perceive their value in terms of their ability to discover new solutions or their ability to create new works of value."
Apple is as much a software ompany as it is a hardware company. MS is much more a software company. Cook is a supply chain guy, and with the majority of Apple manufactirung happening at third parties, the operationa excellence is what makes Cook a great CEO, more so because he seems to understand all the other sides of the business as well.
I think it took a while for the Ballmer effect to kick in at Microsoft. Organizations have creating new things baked into their DNA, and it does resist corrosion. So I am curious to see if Cook can avoid squelching that like Ballmer.
Operations is great to have and Cook is really good at it. Focus on ops can destroy the creative process though.
I figure another 8 years and we'll know for sure (Ballmer clocked in at 14). I look forward to being wrong, Cook is a great human being.
Also Microsoft lost all relevance in being a mobile phone platform under Ballmer. I can't think of a similar blunder from Cook, maybe losing mindshare from creative professionals, but that's a much smaller market that Apple could be making a comeback in.
Cook is 10 years into his tenure at Apple. Since Ballmer took over in 2000, we can look at the period between 2001 and 2011 for comparison.
During that time, their stock price fell at least 10%. The launch of Windows Vista was bungled (XP outlived Vista). They had a string of failures in the phone market, before finally abandoning it. They had a string of failed acquisitions, including Nokia. Remember the Microsoft Stores?
Azure was the only real lasting success acheived under Ballmer.
I just bought an M1 Macbook Pro (my first Apple laptop) because I didn’t have anymore reasons to stay with PC. For a long time I was looking at Macbooks like shiny overpriced gadgets, but with its 20 hour lifetime, great screen and performance, amazing touchpad, while Windows 10 being buggier than Windows 7, I stopped having reasons not to switch.
I always found the "overpriced" theme on Apple hardware curious: it always sounds like people are comparing with "wrong" PC hardware.
Whenever I was buying a new laptop, I've only considered MacBooks because they did one thing I cared about a lot (high resolution displays in portable machines), and they were usually cheaper[1] compared to laptops I went for (lately X1 Carbons: worse performance [lower TDP CPUs], better battery life, worse but acceptable screen, keyboards way ahead — in essense, better keyboards and Linux compatibility + nicer design [personal take :] for worse performance and pricing on par or worse than MacBooks). M1 Macs now win even on battery life too, so it's going to be even harder to stay away from them going forward.
Still, keyboards and Linux compatibility will likely keep me in the HP/Thinkpad business lines for longer, but pricing is not the factor when it comes to choosing Apple computers or not for some jobs.
[1] Configuring a Thinkpad X1 Carbon 8th gen brings the Linux + i7-10610U 1.8GHz/16GB RAM/1TB SSD/2560x1440 screen up to $2022 today (down from "retail" price of $3140, which I hope nobody is paying anywhere, ever), and for roughly that money you get a 13" Macbook Pro with i5 ("up to 3.8GHz"), 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD and a 2560x1600 13" screen.
Maybe you are right, and Linux desktop improved probably a lot in the last 10 years, I was just very frustrated because I bought a high-end gaming laptop last year with Windows 10, and the system slowed down all the time (for example I had to wait seconds for the start menu after pressing the Windows button).
With the new Macbook Pro everything is just instant (I love the instant wake-up, the instant log-in with the fingerprint sensor...not sure how the Linux desktop compares). I remember how much effort Microsoft put in these things in the old days.
If Apple ends up tumbling down in the next, say, 5 years, with Cook still at the helm, what would that say about Cook as the CEO? To me, Apple seems to be in the Microsoft's home-run stretch where they dominated the market with 99% desktop penetration for a while, but no clear "where next".
Apple certainly won't fall because of their sheer size and momentum (just like Microsoft never did), but we look at things differently at that scale and for a while, Microsoft was "stagnant" and "backtracking".
I don't know how people define "most successful CEOs of all time", but I do know that predicting future is a fool's errand (you can go into statistics and risk evaluation, but here we are talking about one person thus not much room for "statistics": I mean, everyone who's hugely successful but then hugely fails has been mostly hugely successful right until they failed).
If they stumble in five years, which seems incredibly unlikely given that there’s a billion people that love their iphones more than almost anything, he would still probably be the most successful CEO in history if you consider shareholder value created.
Definitely. I'd be interested to see how this breaks down for the S&P 500, with more rigor around what constitutes an engineer - maybe have different categories?
There is a common trope around engineers being better managers and CEo in germany as we.. Not software, but engineers in general. Everyody always points at the successfull ones, only to forget that some of the biggest business fuck ups, e.g. VW, happened under engineering CEOs (without MBAs).
Furthermore, IMO there are a ton of questionable assumptions littered throughout the article.
The author goes into extreme detail describing exactly why software itself scales. This seems to have little to do with the CEO, though they keep jumping to comparisons between a software engineer's 'predictable' behavior, and the 'non-software' CEO's 'predictable' behavior.
Agreed. A plausible explanation for why the largest companies are tech companies is low marginal cost of replication combined with widespread appeal combined with network effects and IP moat which confers monopoly margins.
Other businesses are constrained in a way tech companies will never be (geographical, meat space constraints) and are in legacy industries where decades of competition has eaten away margins.
The explanation that the tech CEOs are better (although I'd agree with that statement in general) isn't the best one.
Even if we did want to accept the definition of "better CEO" from the article, we'd need to look at performance over time: increase in market cap over their tenure.
Next, a cut off at 10 in an attempt to generalize is silly: why not top 1 when we are at 0%. Or top 2? Or top 1000? Top 10 is arbitrary and not telling.
And I am sure real data actually hides in the smaller companies market cap movement.
Coding really does teach something that I've never learned anyplace else. I've also done just about zero in the arts, so maybe there are some parallels there, I should try music or painting someday to see. I know for sure that math and engineering classes didn't teach me what coding taught me.
I am surprised you did not get that from mathematics, so I wonder what level/type of mathematics did you do?
I can get that you usually don't get it from regular high school mathematics, but even there one should learn to deal with proofs and deducing stuff in a precise, non-ambiguous way, and you have to pay attention to detail.
Coding allowed me to build things with my analytical mind liking precision and patterns, so it's the way for my "mathematical" brain to express creativity.
I did not mention that mathematics did not teach me that, but programming pushed that to a limit that maths didn't - probably because I do not spend 8h a day, every working day doing maths :)
No engineering discipline allows for “ambiguity” at least how you use it here, try building a train or a spacecraft with that level of ambiguity at that point the bugs tend to make things go boom.
I'd argue that it forces you to think clearly about problems. You cannot write a program unless you understand exactly what you want it to do. In contrast typical CEO excels at creating tons of meaningless fluff. Perhaps mathematics or philosophy may have similar effects on people's ways of thinking?
This is not a reply to you personally well not just but to everyone else...
A) I think you greatly underestimate what other engineering disciplines bestow not to mention require
B) Really? Have you seen modern software development practices? barely functioning MVPs, vertical slices, pivoting and hacks galore....
Like personally I would wager that most programmers do not understand exactly what they are building when they start, I know I don’t always and I never really met anyone who does so either at least not constantly. You know the general direction then you tend to hack things until they work and optimize and fix edge cases as needed.
We very much can write programs without understanding what we need to do or even how things work otherwise we wouldn’t have bugs that are not hardware errata and even then one can argue that if you truly know what you are doing you plan for hardware failure.
> A) I think you greatly underestimate what other engineering disciplines bestow not to mention require
What makes you think I underestimate those other disciplines? I do not. The other disciplines tend to focus on tangible rather than on abstraction. Programming (if you want to actually be good at it) requires you to tackle abstractions all day long. My theory is that that ability translates (in some people!) to being better CEO.
> B) Really? Have you seen modern software development practices? barely functioning MVPs, vertical slices, pivoting and hacks galore....
You are mixing stuff here. I can guarantee you that if you know what you want to build and have the clarity to make the right choices, the hacky project will turn out better than if you don't. Specific development practices (e.g. hacks vs. no hacks) has no relation to personal ability to formulate clear problem statement.
Nothing here is exclusive to programming, in fact this isn’t exclusive to engineering even.
Formulating a clear problem statement is applicable to essentially every field and I would argue is probably the hardest thing to master and what most people fail at.
At least personally the most improvement I have experienced in formulating a problem statement had nothing to do with actual technical work but rather when I worked in professional services and had to come up with new service offerings, writing up proposals and managing stakeholders.
Formulating a problem is definitely a soft skill that I would say most purely technical programs don’t teach that well, quite often because you are given the problem statement to solve. This is also true for technical work and why some people might find it hard to progress in their careers. I’ve met plenty of brilliant and highly experienced engineers that suffer from major tunnel vision and couldn’t see the forest for the trees.
To iterate different embodiments of ideas with people until something gets traction. I do think that is actually something the arts teachers, but I've done none of the arts so no personal experience to compare.
Hi, I'm the original author. The point of the article is as follows: there is clearly a trend towards top market-cap companies being founded by software engineering CEOs, but why? The data regarding the trend is pretty clear. I believe there are two reasons:
1. Software has become a global form of super infrastructure that facilitate scaling, but there's more going on.
2. I believe that guys like Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk and Gates are using software effectively to speed value fulfillment cycles – pretty much in everything they are doing, from rockets to eradicating disease, or just shipping packages.
Software engineering CEOs are realizing value at faster rates, IMO, by executing well on all 4 stages of the value fulfillment cycle -- see https://iism.org/post/glossary-value-stage-82. I mean, these guys are all billionaires, so clearly the market thinks they are valuable (Larry, Sergey and Ma Huateng as well).
As to why: I believe it’s the relationship between emerging infrastructure and the value fulfillment cycle. Software happens to be the emerging super infrastructure, so software engineers are naturally emerging as the next generation of industrialists. Not to say there aren’t other emerging trends of significance; but for now, software and software variants is the emerging super infrastructure. Discovery of value has always been the result of iterative discovery – software just happens to facilitate quick iterations of value attempts, and software engineer tend to be more Agile than traditional plan driven companies.
8/10 companies on your list are software companies, of those 7/8 have software engineer CEO's. The only thing you've shown is that successful software companies are often led by software engineers. I bet you'll find similar patterns in other industries. Who better to have visionary leadership than an engineer who grasps the industry perfectly.
I'd love to believe that software engineers make better CEO's in general, but you'd have to show me a list of companies that became successful only after hiring an ex-SE CEO, and preferably in another industry than information processing.
Software is eating the world but you are discounting the possibility that this force is simply drawing in the best and brightest; part sorting hat and part black hole pulling in the biggest stars.
Cornelius Vanderbilt [1] mastered steam powered shipping before tackling rail. An operator of technical machinery more than a trained engineer but relatively very technical for the 2nd Industrial Age IMO.
Interesting that you propose their success is based on the value fulfillment cycle which seems like something I would be far more likely to hear from an mba/pm than a software engineer.
IMO, the answer to why the biggest companies tend to be started by software engineers is far far simpler and something you can find in your ordinary econ 101 textbook. Your standard natural monopoly is one which has high fixed costs and low marginal costs such that the first one to dominate the market can usually sustain that because their ongoing costs are low while any new entrant has to pay down the high fixed costs to enter the market. While usually associated with utilities, software matches that pretty well and software companies tend to be started by software engineers.
Writing software (the fixed cost) is extremely expensive as you need to pay a lot to get good engineers and you need a ton of them to handle the complexity associated with the largest markets but once you have written the software, it is relatively cheap to run (the marginal cost). Once one company starts dominating a software market, they can amortize the fixed costs across the greatest number of users and continuously invest to make their software continuously better such that it becomes almost impossible for a competitor to catch up.
You can see this today with the cloud as AWS rakes in billions in profits because they have the most features, biggest head start, and most IAAS revenue while the other companies lose billions (5.6 billion for google last year for example) trying to catch up.
I think, that is the power of word "many". If the claim was "1% of all CEOs are sw engineers", it wouldn't be that impressive, even though 1% may be actually quite lot of people (many). :)
Current, sure, but he showed up after Google was already successful. Becoming the CEO of Google made him successful, but he didn't make Google successful.
> Apple's current CEO...
Same thing.
> Jobs, the founding CEO, was also not a software engineer.
True but he co-founded it with a software engineer (Wozniak) who was arguably influential enough that he had the influence of a CEO if not the title.
> Amazon's CEO, Bezos, was a software engineer
He may not have held the title or had the function, but apparently he had the knowledge.
So you can only be a software engineer if you studied computer science? Not any other highly technical degree that's regularly hired into software engineering positions?
Jobs is said to have influenced the choice and use of Objective C at NS significantly - even if he didn’t code, he had enough understanding to guide it. Also his first job at Atari was as a developer, though it’s said that he got Wozniak to do most of it!
>Current, sure, but he showed up after Google was already successful. Becoming the CEO of Google made him successful, but he didn't make Google successful.
And the previous CEO of Google was Eric Schmidt, also not a software developer, and successful before taking the role at google.
>True but he co-founded it with a software engineer (Wozniak) who was arguably influential enough that he had the influence of a CEO if not the title.
Just about every "CEO" has people with outsized influence. Saying that Woz had the influence of a CEO but not the title kind of misses the point.
>He may not have held the title or had the function, but apparently he had the knowledge.
I know how to make a woodshed (I even did last year!). I don't think anyone would confuse me with a carpenter.
Wikipedia calls him a "businessman and software engineer". He has a PhD in EECS with a dissertation on "the problems of managing distributed software development and tools for solving these problems."[1] He never coded at Google but he started his career in a technical role.
Eric Schmidt wrote lex. He was an engineering executive at Sun. His background is absolutely as a software engineer.
People seem to be missing the point of the article. It's all about ways of thinking. It isn't literally saying that the more algorithms you memorise the better at CEO-ing you become. That's way too literal. It's saying things like, "if you've written and debugged software a bunch of times, you learn about iteration and predicting/root causing failures, which helps you be a better CEO".
Yeah I mean they're all CEO's, they don't do software engineering as far as I know. Maybe they once did, 15-20 years ago, and maybe that was their major in uni, but I think it's a bad trend to put a label on people based on what they went to school for. What you pick in school is not your life, and real life / work experience is more educational than the education system (in my experience, but then, I'm college level at best).
So yeah. These people are CEO's, not software engineers.
Say I majored in physics and went on to get a masters in fine arts and became a world-renowned screenwriter, would you call me a mathematician? That’s argument is equivalent with claims that Cook is a software engineer.
Most US Congresspersons studied law, most high-ranking Chinese Communist Party members studied engineering. Most of both spent limited time practicing their profession, they're professional politicians, not lawyers or engineers.
It still says something interesting about the respective bodies. If there's some kid out there who wants to grow up to be a CEO, should she study computer science or, like, history?
How about they study, or work in, the field in which they want to be CEO? Damn.
It’s not like history is some useless knowledge. Software engineering is still the new hotness. Give it time and the headline will change to why meteor engineers make the best CEOs while we all pine for the days we sat on top
I agree with you except about Bezos, the point is not if you work as a developer while you're the CEO, if that was the metric no CEO of a large company would "be" anything.
Yeah, this seems more like "why are software companies more successful". Looking at only the top 10 companies then speculating seems like a waste of time, why not just omit the data entirely at this point?
Intelligent people make the best CEOs. Software engineers are probably more intelligent, on average, than others. I think it might be better to look at IQ+EQ and see if there's a correlation there instead (although that data is probably not feasible to obtain).
Software Engineering is bounded by the laws of magic.
Engineering requires creativity to harness a material to perform useful work, within the material’s tolerances.
Software Engineering requires creativity to create worlds that have no existence in reality, other than in the imagination of the software engineer himself.
And in today’s world, software engineering is essential to make physical engineering a reality.
No, software engineering is also bound by the laws of physics. The worlds do have existence in reality, which you will find out as soon as anything you create starts hitting the physical limits of CPU, memory, latency, which are all pretty much governed by c, the cosmic speed limit.
> And in today’s world, software engineering is essential to make physical engineering a reality.
Umm, if the product is software the domain expertise helps for that, but im not sure how companies like Shell or United Airlines benifit from a software CEO.
"Systems thinking" is useful to manage any organization. I don't know if it scales, but I can't count the number of times I've seen an engineer put in charge of a project just because they can understand a data flow diagram.
Software is eating the world. IT costs and benefits are high. Getting IT right in many organizations is now more vital than ever before.
The problem with using market cap for tech is that Wall Street and the financial industry in general factors in too much "hype" and imagined future earnings into their valuations. This should be obvious to anyone that sees headlines of X Company with unreliable revenue model now valued at $50 Billion.
If instead you look at industries which don't have as much of this future hype, they are much more competitive. Fashion, for instance. LVMH has a market cap of $283 billion and Bernard Arnault briefly surpassed Bezos as the richest man in the world in 2019.
I don't doubt that Amazon will overtake Walmart, but I have an issue with calling someone the best CEO today based on a metric that is dependent on future projections.
I don't think you have understood my initial point. Please, read my first comment again.
I'm not saying that Amazon won't overtake Walmart, but that tech companies benefit from future projections factored into their valuations, while other non-hyped businesses don't. If the argument is that "software engineers make the best CEOs", it seems more likely that companies in the software industry simply get higher valuations for the aforementioned reasons.
Still not particularly useful if we are comparing new companies to old ones. I'm sure the brand new oil companies of 1875 had incredible revenue growth in the ±20 years after their founding, too. Does that mean that oil men make the best CEOs?
I mean, those oil men clearly had something going on that was relevant to what was tractionable at the time, and revenue growth can be an indicator of finding that traction in the market. As mentioned below, it can also be a sign of graft.
Of course through the lens of history, considering climate change, the best CEO was the one who didn't unleash a huge pile of CO2!
Hi, I'm the original author. It's late for me, but if you have questions or comment for me, I will get back to you in the morning.
The article has to do with this idea: "Software engineers deeply understand that you iterate your way to value through hundreds of failed attempts.”
I by no means think software engineers are smarter or more virtuous. What I do think is that the high rates of fail from writing code teaches them to discover value iterative -- hence the Agile movement. Learning is pivoting moment by moment, and planning one value attempt or value experiment at a time IMO. It is the nature of value that shaped this behavior IMO, not some superior virtue -- see https://iism.org/post/glossary-value-76
Why software engineers in particular then, if scientists, inventors, artists, and many others are also known for iterating through and learning from their failures?
I also agree with others who said limiting analysis to the top 10 seems arbitrary, especially when you're covering mostly just the runaway outliers despite having the general overall claim of "why are software engineers better CEOs?" Does your analysis still hold when you expand your field of vision to the top 100, or top 1,000 companies?
> Why software engineers in particular then, if scientists, inventors, artists, and many others are also known for iterating through and learning from their failures?
Because with software the time-to-market is instantaneous.
What this seems to show is that CEOs in a particular sector often have expertise in that sector. And that Tech is currently the most highly valued sector as measured by market capitalisation. To find evidence of Software Engineers being the best CEOs overall you'd really need to find examples of them running non-tech firms successfully or examples of non-Software Engineers running tech firms poorly.
I'm the original author, and I certainly believe that there are all kinds of great CEOs. What I am saying in this article is that software engineering CEOs are breaking out due to the super-infrastructure that is software, and that guys like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are using software to speed the value fulfillment cycle -- see https://iism.org/post/glossary-value-fulfillment-cycle-68
I mean i think its clear what you're saying, the evidence you provide just doesn't support your conclusion all that well compared to the other possibilities.
Many of the 'top companies' at the moment are youngish software companies, many still run by their founders or early employees, which include lots of software engineers.
If the current big thing was biotech the 'best' (ie most) CEOs would be chemists.
As someone working in it-consulting for some big companies in germany, i can't confirm. It's usually the other way around - if a company grows too fast, they're tempted to make some smart engineer a manager. usually they will have a hard time coming from a very detailed world into the high level business world. besides being good problem-analysts, they are confronted with politics, strategy, leadership, ... - so all the skills that really matter at ceo level.
That being said, i can't agree with the statement that sw engineers make the best CEOs. But i tend to agree that a basic knowledge of IT/Software/Hardware is a must.
Primarily because the companies listed succeeded in capitalizing on Software Eating the World (Thiel).
Software companies grew the way they did because, for a while, there was little regulatory capture, with tech doing what tech wanted, at least with the unicorns. Thiel, PG have commented on this.
There was a recent article on HN from O'Reilly - the new wave of breakthroughs anticipated, in biotech, might not have room for engineer CEOs, nor the unicorn growth of software-based start-ups.
Just a small nitpick: what you probably mean is there was little regulation. Regulatory capture is what occurs after regulation has been established, is seen as a hindrance and companies start currying favour by greasing the wheels. In a word, captured regulatory agencies are beholden to the industry. See also: Ajit Pai in the FCC, SOPA, Boeing and the FAA...
...because these companies are engineering companies?
7/10 of the biggest companies are software companies. 6/7 of the software companies were founded by engineers. Ma is an outlier.
Any of these other points might be true, but there's no empirical reason to expect that that they predict "success." The simpler explanation is that software company founders tend to be engineers. Financial companies tend to be run by financiers, etc.
Conclusions like "discovery of solutions via techniques like continuous A/B testing" may be true, but they're not required to explain why engineer founded companies dominate the top 10.
Thank you for using a causal diagram. A tool so few understand but so many can benefit from. Cuts to the heart of the argument and eliminates all the bullshit.
One of the brilliant things about start-ups is that it allows you to step directly into the CEO shoes, and I'm amazed by and extremely grateful for the willingness of investors to allow first time founders to learn on the fly.
There is a hurdle though, that being a CEO of a startup is a full time job. A consequence is that if you happen to be a strong engineer with relevant skills in a cash strapped environment, you will come under strong pressure to be an engineer and perform poorly as a CEO unless you can raise the funds to hire a top-tier engineer.
Now I get to insert yet another gripe against Europe and its horrible environment for fundraising. I believe that the lack of technical CEOs is likely due to the lack of resources (both at startups and large companies) to develop them.
From the slew of negative nitpicky comments here, it seems that Hacker News has been taken over by MBA and not technical types. Yes the nerds you looked down on in high school are doing way better than you, no hard feelings. :)
I agree with the article, but there's also a much simpler answer. To be successful in a world-changing sense, you have to actually care about making a good product. People get MBAs to make personal money, not to make world-changing products. People in these leadership roles got into software because they were interested in making cool products. Nowadays we see some people getting into software primarily to make some personal money - they won't succeed either, not in this world-changing leadership sense.
> People get MBAs to make personal money, not to make world-changing products.
I disagree. Any major in any field may or may not pursue making personal money, build wold-changing products or have nothing planned for their future. I think you are projecting your own anecdotal experience to the general case.
Not all MBAs are pursuing personal money, but when there's high visibility debacle (Intel, Boeing) there are always MBAs and accountant involved, not engineers. It's against engineer's logic to do moves/products like that.
This article needs an image of the plane with red dots where all the bullet holes were. That, or to explain how great software engineer CEOs include Jonathan Schwartz, Stephen Elop, and all those one-person companies that are still waiting for the coffee shops in Palo Alto to reopen so they can pick up their “business address” mail.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] threadI think the obvious lesson here is when society becomes reoriented around a new field (in this case software), people with experience in that field are going to do well.
Around 1990 Japanese finance majors made the best CEOs, because the Japanese financial markets were near their peak and Japanese bank stocks were highly valued.
> Prospecting for oil is one concrete form of the abstract pattern of discovering value
So is literally everything.
Police officer: discovering value by figuring out the right person to arrest
Doctor: discovering value by figuring out what disease.
Etc
- Google/Alphabet's current CEO is a materials engineer [0]
- Apple's current CEO is an MBA with a degree in industrial engineering [1]. Jobs, the founding CEO, was also not a software engineer.
- Amazon's CEO, Bezos, was a software engineer [2], but it's widely known that he didn't do programming work for Amazon. I don't think he would consider himself a "software engineer" today. There is a HN regular who was an early Amazon employee and has talked about this (his name now escapes me).
That makes 7/10 of the "top 10" companies in this chart headed by non-software-engineer CEOs!!!
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Cook
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos
Also, the article is referring to founding CEOs, and hence referring to Page/Brin and Jobs/Wozniak, not Pichai and Cook.
[0]: From Cook's Wikipedia article: After graduating from Auburn University, Cook spent 12 years in IBM's personal computer business, ultimately serving as the director of North American fulfillment.
Also, needless to say, Jobs was not a software engineer either.
> *Wozniak obtained a master’s in computer science in 1987 and does code. Though Jobs was brilliant and technically savvy, Jobs clearly didn’t professionally code; he did contribute to creative and technical designs
"Contributing to creative and technical designs" does not make you a software engineer. LOL. Might as well give my grandmother the moniker as well (she's contributed to some creative designs for my startup).
--
Also, it's a terribly written article. I mean, this is content-marketing level, https://shortlyai.com type of stuff.
> Conversely, traditional CEOs are regularly incentivized and seduced into pleasing financial markets by having higher returns in the near term. This typically overhyped mission of “improved earnings” occasionally results in companies pursuing unsustainable schemes that are focused on boosting quarterly profits (liquid value).
Software engineer CEOs do this exact same thing, probably more so! (Mostly as an artifact of their Silicon Valley VC investors pumping them into SPACs and IPOs to get a fat payday.)
They paint a picture of non-software-engineer CEOs as idiots, which is completely idiotic. Most successful companies throughout history have not been founded by software engineers. This is a recent phenomenon and the article's author(s) have no idea what they're talking about.
In terms of title? No. In terms of function? Well sure, he's a co-founder.
In a small company, every person has enough influence to rival the CEO and every role overlaps enough that the distinction given by titles is meaningless inside the company. Mainly the distinction given by titles determines how people market themselves outside the company where the dividing roles will appear clear for marketing purposes, which they are not in reality.
The article actually refers to Jobs & Wozniak.
My view having known quite a few engineers who got MBAs (outside of the software world) is that it very much marked a point where people had decided they wanted to stop being a practising engineer and wanted to be someone who managed practising engineers (directly or indirectly).
I was already managing a team before I got it. After I got it I've had a mix of roles as both engineer and manager. I didn't intend to switch track, it's more about being better at both tracks.
Pretty much same comment for Apple, it remains to be seen if Tim Cook is another Jobs/Gates or if he is instead a Ballmer.
Regarding Bezos, if you read the article you will find that you actually made the one of the major points in the article with your comment about Bezos.
Well, Sergey and Larry failed in writing their initial crawler in C (they even published a paper on how not to write a crawler in C), so paid a programmer to write it in python. I believe he became employee #1.
To your note on Bezos, the whole article makes no points about whether Bezos actually programmed or not, just that he thinks analytically and runs experiments. I mean, great for him! But this article isn't driven by any empirical data. Aside from its disingenuous claims about CEOs, it's a very emotionally written piece (doesn't feel like a software engineer wrote it ;).
I mean, read this:
> After much consideration, it would seem there are unseen forces derived from the nature of value itself that are biasing software engineering CEOs towards greater success, and the raw power of these forces appear to sculpt many of the successful practices of these leaders.
What???!??!? What does that mean???? "Derived from the nature of value itself ... the raw power of these forces ... sculpt many of the successful practices"
This reads like a college freshman's Business 101 term paper.
>So, obviously, those that understand the super infrastructure that is software have a competitive advantage over those that don’t. But, as these leaders move up, they aren’t actually the ones writing the software. So, what differentiates their management practices such that those under them are better able to create and scale value? Other forces must be at play, it’s not as simple as the company’s products and services are software based. In the next sections, we will drill into the value stages for likely causes.
I mean, he clearly isn't writing the code, but he also clearly understands how to run a software org based on him telling wall street that his team is working on a quarter 3 years out.
Read the potential value portion of article or read further about my understanding of value here: https://iism.org/post/glossary-value-76
"Economic value is also theorized to be the universal organizing force of secular society, and the nature of value is thought to be responsible for the emergence of the three dominant value management systems, each having proceeded out of its own particular value state. Individual contributors are often attracted to a particular type of value, and they are therefore intrinsically motivated by the unique properties of that value type. Often, humans perceive their own value to society in terms of their ability to produce or replicate a thing of value such as a meal, or concert, or a manufactured good. Others might perceive their value in terms of their net worth, and creative individuals might perceive their value in terms of their ability to discover new solutions or their ability to create new works of value."
How many more trillion dollar do you need , to give Tim Cook his due credit for operational excellence
Operations is great to have and Cook is really good at it. Focus on ops can destroy the creative process though.
I figure another 8 years and we'll know for sure (Ballmer clocked in at 14). I look forward to being wrong, Cook is a great human being.
Fixed the typo.
Tim Cook is about 2/3rds through of Ballmer's tenure. If you were to take a bet today, do you see Tim Cook doing the direction of Ballmer?
During that time, their stock price fell at least 10%. The launch of Windows Vista was bungled (XP outlived Vista). They had a string of failures in the phone market, before finally abandoning it. They had a string of failed acquisitions, including Nokia. Remember the Microsoft Stores?
Azure was the only real lasting success acheived under Ballmer.
Whenever I was buying a new laptop, I've only considered MacBooks because they did one thing I cared about a lot (high resolution displays in portable machines), and they were usually cheaper[1] compared to laptops I went for (lately X1 Carbons: worse performance [lower TDP CPUs], better battery life, worse but acceptable screen, keyboards way ahead — in essense, better keyboards and Linux compatibility + nicer design [personal take :] for worse performance and pricing on par or worse than MacBooks). M1 Macs now win even on battery life too, so it's going to be even harder to stay away from them going forward.
Still, keyboards and Linux compatibility will likely keep me in the HP/Thinkpad business lines for longer, but pricing is not the factor when it comes to choosing Apple computers or not for some jobs.
[1] Configuring a Thinkpad X1 Carbon 8th gen brings the Linux + i7-10610U 1.8GHz/16GB RAM/1TB SSD/2560x1440 screen up to $2022 today (down from "retail" price of $3140, which I hope nobody is paying anywhere, ever), and for roughly that money you get a 13" Macbook Pro with i5 ("up to 3.8GHz"), 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD and a 2560x1600 13" screen.
With the new Macbook Pro everything is just instant (I love the instant wake-up, the instant log-in with the fingerprint sensor...not sure how the Linux desktop compares). I remember how much effort Microsoft put in these things in the old days.
No that doesn't remain to be seen. Tim Cook is clearly one of the most successful CEOs of all time. Compare Apple now to Apple when Jobs died.
Apple certainly won't fall because of their sheer size and momentum (just like Microsoft never did), but we look at things differently at that scale and for a while, Microsoft was "stagnant" and "backtracking".
I don't know how people define "most successful CEOs of all time", but I do know that predicting future is a fool's errand (you can go into statistics and risk evaluation, but here we are talking about one person thus not much room for "statistics": I mean, everyone who's hugely successful but then hugely fails has been mostly hugely successful right until they failed).
The author goes into extreme detail describing exactly why software itself scales. This seems to have little to do with the CEO, though they keep jumping to comparisons between a software engineer's 'predictable' behavior, and the 'non-software' CEO's 'predictable' behavior.
Other businesses are constrained in a way tech companies will never be (geographical, meat space constraints) and are in legacy industries where decades of competition has eaten away margins.
The explanation that the tech CEOs are better (although I'd agree with that statement in general) isn't the best one.
Even if we did want to accept the definition of "better CEO" from the article, we'd need to look at performance over time: increase in market cap over their tenure.
Next, a cut off at 10 in an attempt to generalize is silly: why not top 1 when we are at 0%. Or top 2? Or top 1000? Top 10 is arbitrary and not telling.
And I am sure real data actually hides in the smaller companies market cap movement.
- Attention to detail
- Control of flow (if this then that) mentality
- More binary thinking
- Precision when describing (programming does not allow ambiguity)
- A lot of frustration tolerance :)
That's at least my experience
Probabilistic programming and machine learning do!
I can get that you usually don't get it from regular high school mathematics, but even there one should learn to deal with proofs and deducing stuff in a precise, non-ambiguous way, and you have to pay attention to detail.
Coding allowed me to build things with my analytical mind liking precision and patterns, so it's the way for my "mathematical" brain to express creativity.
Really? Should we count how many bugs happen due to type conversion, precision errors, off by one etc?
A) I think you greatly underestimate what other engineering disciplines bestow not to mention require
B) Really? Have you seen modern software development practices? barely functioning MVPs, vertical slices, pivoting and hacks galore....
Like personally I would wager that most programmers do not understand exactly what they are building when they start, I know I don’t always and I never really met anyone who does so either at least not constantly. You know the general direction then you tend to hack things until they work and optimize and fix edge cases as needed.
We very much can write programs without understanding what we need to do or even how things work otherwise we wouldn’t have bugs that are not hardware errata and even then one can argue that if you truly know what you are doing you plan for hardware failure.
What makes you think I underestimate those other disciplines? I do not. The other disciplines tend to focus on tangible rather than on abstraction. Programming (if you want to actually be good at it) requires you to tackle abstractions all day long. My theory is that that ability translates (in some people!) to being better CEO.
> B) Really? Have you seen modern software development practices? barely functioning MVPs, vertical slices, pivoting and hacks galore....
You are mixing stuff here. I can guarantee you that if you know what you want to build and have the clarity to make the right choices, the hacky project will turn out better than if you don't. Specific development practices (e.g. hacks vs. no hacks) has no relation to personal ability to formulate clear problem statement.
Formulating a clear problem statement is applicable to essentially every field and I would argue is probably the hardest thing to master and what most people fail at.
At least personally the most improvement I have experienced in formulating a problem statement had nothing to do with actual technical work but rather when I worked in professional services and had to come up with new service offerings, writing up proposals and managing stakeholders.
Formulating a problem is definitely a soft skill that I would say most purely technical programs don’t teach that well, quite often because you are given the problem statement to solve. This is also true for technical work and why some people might find it hard to progress in their careers. I’ve met plenty of brilliant and highly experienced engineers that suffer from major tunnel vision and couldn’t see the forest for the trees.
1. Software has become a global form of super infrastructure that facilitate scaling, but there's more going on. 2. I believe that guys like Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk and Gates are using software effectively to speed value fulfillment cycles – pretty much in everything they are doing, from rockets to eradicating disease, or just shipping packages.
Software engineering CEOs are realizing value at faster rates, IMO, by executing well on all 4 stages of the value fulfillment cycle -- see https://iism.org/post/glossary-value-stage-82. I mean, these guys are all billionaires, so clearly the market thinks they are valuable (Larry, Sergey and Ma Huateng as well).
As to why: I believe it’s the relationship between emerging infrastructure and the value fulfillment cycle. Software happens to be the emerging super infrastructure, so software engineers are naturally emerging as the next generation of industrialists. Not to say there aren’t other emerging trends of significance; but for now, software and software variants is the emerging super infrastructure. Discovery of value has always been the result of iterative discovery – software just happens to facilitate quick iterations of value attempts, and software engineer tend to be more Agile than traditional plan driven companies.
Apparently it's not, see parent comment. Doubling-down and ignoring the criticism is downright dishonest.
I'd love to believe that software engineers make better CEO's in general, but you'd have to show me a list of companies that became successful only after hiring an ex-SE CEO, and preferably in another industry than information processing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelius_Vanderbilt
IMO, the answer to why the biggest companies tend to be started by software engineers is far far simpler and something you can find in your ordinary econ 101 textbook. Your standard natural monopoly is one which has high fixed costs and low marginal costs such that the first one to dominate the market can usually sustain that because their ongoing costs are low while any new entrant has to pay down the high fixed costs to enter the market. While usually associated with utilities, software matches that pretty well and software companies tend to be started by software engineers.
Writing software (the fixed cost) is extremely expensive as you need to pay a lot to get good engineers and you need a ton of them to handle the complexity associated with the largest markets but once you have written the software, it is relatively cheap to run (the marginal cost). Once one company starts dominating a software market, they can amortize the fixed costs across the greatest number of users and continuously invest to make their software continuously better such that it becomes almost impossible for a competitor to catch up.
You can see this today with the cloud as AWS rakes in billions in profits because they have the most features, biggest head start, and most IAAS revenue while the other companies lose billions (5.6 billion for google last year for example) trying to catch up.
Yes.
The original HN title was something like "Software engineers make the best CEOS, if measured by market cap".
Current, sure, but he showed up after Google was already successful. Becoming the CEO of Google made him successful, but he didn't make Google successful.
> Apple's current CEO...
Same thing.
> Jobs, the founding CEO, was also not a software engineer.
True but he co-founded it with a software engineer (Wozniak) who was arguably influential enough that he had the influence of a CEO if not the title.
> Amazon's CEO, Bezos, was a software engineer
He may not have held the title or had the function, but apparently he had the knowledge.
And the previous CEO of Google was Eric Schmidt, also not a software developer, and successful before taking the role at google.
>True but he co-founded it with a software engineer (Wozniak) who was arguably influential enough that he had the influence of a CEO if not the title.
Just about every "CEO" has people with outsized influence. Saying that Woz had the influence of a CEO but not the title kind of misses the point.
>He may not have held the title or had the function, but apparently he had the knowledge.
I know how to make a woodshed (I even did last year!). I don't think anyone would confuse me with a carpenter.
Wikipedia calls him a "businessman and software engineer". He has a PhD in EECS with a dissertation on "the problems of managing distributed software development and tools for solving these problems."[1] He never coded at Google but he started his career in a technical role.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt
People seem to be missing the point of the article. It's all about ways of thinking. It isn't literally saying that the more algorithms you memorise the better at CEO-ing you become. That's way too literal. It's saying things like, "if you've written and debugged software a bunch of times, you learn about iteration and predicting/root causing failures, which helps you be a better CEO".
So yeah. These people are CEO's, not software engineers.
Most US Congresspersons studied law, most high-ranking Chinese Communist Party members studied engineering. Most of both spent limited time practicing their profession, they're professional politicians, not lawyers or engineers.
It still says something interesting about the respective bodies. If there's some kid out there who wants to grow up to be a CEO, should she study computer science or, like, history?
It’s not like history is some useless knowledge. Software engineering is still the new hotness. Give it time and the headline will change to why meteor engineers make the best CEOs while we all pine for the days we sat on top
Also: being a monopoly helps.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=PaulDavisThe1st
If other engineering disciplines, it seems a bit pretentious.
Software Engineering is bounded by the laws of magic.
Engineering requires creativity to harness a material to perform useful work, within the material’s tolerances.
Software Engineering requires creativity to create worlds that have no existence in reality, other than in the imagination of the software engineer himself.
And in today’s world, software engineering is essential to make physical engineering a reality.
TRY ME! I bet no one can think of a single thing that I can't say is just ultimately due to physics.
> And in today’s world, software engineering is essential to make physical engineering a reality.
It is literally quite the exact opposite.
Software is eating the world. IT costs and benefits are high. Getting IT right in many organizations is now more vital than ever before.
If instead you look at industries which don't have as much of this future hype, they are much more competitive. Fashion, for instance. LVMH has a market cap of $283 billion and Bernard Arnault briefly surpassed Bezos as the richest man in the world in 2019.
Of course now take a look at this macro trends chart comparing walmart to amazon
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/stock-comparison?s=revenu...
Now tell me your best guess on when when Amazon will pass Walmart to take Fortune 1.
Edit: one thing about revenue and profit is that there are businesses that operate off of graft that kind of throw a monkey wrench into those measures
I'm not saying that Amazon won't overtake Walmart, but that tech companies benefit from future projections factored into their valuations, while other non-hyped businesses don't. If the argument is that "software engineers make the best CEOs", it seems more likely that companies in the software industry simply get higher valuations for the aforementioned reasons.
Of course through the lens of history, considering climate change, the best CEO was the one who didn't unleash a huge pile of CO2!
The article has to do with this idea: "Software engineers deeply understand that you iterate your way to value through hundreds of failed attempts.”
I by no means think software engineers are smarter or more virtuous. What I do think is that the high rates of fail from writing code teaches them to discover value iterative -- hence the Agile movement. Learning is pivoting moment by moment, and planning one value attempt or value experiment at a time IMO. It is the nature of value that shaped this behavior IMO, not some superior virtue -- see https://iism.org/post/glossary-value-76
I also agree with others who said limiting analysis to the top 10 seems arbitrary, especially when you're covering mostly just the runaway outliers despite having the general overall claim of "why are software engineers better CEOs?" Does your analysis still hold when you expand your field of vision to the top 100, or top 1,000 companies?
You can hack some crazy stuff together really quickly and it's possible for it to have an outsized impact.
Because with software the time-to-market is instantaneous.
Many of the 'top companies' at the moment are youngish software companies, many still run by their founders or early employees, which include lots of software engineers.
If the current big thing was biotech the 'best' (ie most) CEOs would be chemists.
That being said, i can't agree with the statement that sw engineers make the best CEOs. But i tend to agree that a basic knowledge of IT/Software/Hardware is a must.
That is a recursive algorithm.
Software companies grew the way they did because, for a while, there was little regulatory capture, with tech doing what tech wanted, at least with the unicorns. Thiel, PG have commented on this.
There was a recent article on HN from O'Reilly - the new wave of breakthroughs anticipated, in biotech, might not have room for engineer CEOs, nor the unicorn growth of software-based start-ups.
7/10 of the biggest companies are software companies. 6/7 of the software companies were founded by engineers. Ma is an outlier.
Any of these other points might be true, but there's no empirical reason to expect that that they predict "success." The simpler explanation is that software company founders tend to be engineers. Financial companies tend to be run by financiers, etc.
Conclusions like "discovery of solutions via techniques like continuous A/B testing" may be true, but they're not required to explain why engineer founded companies dominate the top 10.
There is a hurdle though, that being a CEO of a startup is a full time job. A consequence is that if you happen to be a strong engineer with relevant skills in a cash strapped environment, you will come under strong pressure to be an engineer and perform poorly as a CEO unless you can raise the funds to hire a top-tier engineer.
Now I get to insert yet another gripe against Europe and its horrible environment for fundraising. I believe that the lack of technical CEOs is likely due to the lack of resources (both at startups and large companies) to develop them.
I agree with the article, but there's also a much simpler answer. To be successful in a world-changing sense, you have to actually care about making a good product. People get MBAs to make personal money, not to make world-changing products. People in these leadership roles got into software because they were interested in making cool products. Nowadays we see some people getting into software primarily to make some personal money - they won't succeed either, not in this world-changing leadership sense.
I disagree. Any major in any field may or may not pursue making personal money, build wold-changing products or have nothing planned for their future. I think you are projecting your own anecdotal experience to the general case.