[ryandrake]

Exactly. There is no way to "hard work" your way from junior employee to Founder or CEO. When the CEO leaves, their replacement always comes from the executive class. The junior can work their way up to senior or even low-level manager. But at some point high up on the ladder, employees come from a totally different aristocracy, and you can't work or even buy your way into that clique. Every company I've ever worked for, when they went looking for a VP-Of-Something, they'd never promote from the proletariat--they'd always go externally and look for someone from the nobility.

[908B64B197]

> Every company I've ever worked for, when they went looking for a VP-Of-Something, they'd never promote from the proletariat--they'd always go externally and look for someone from the nobility.

Interestingly, that might be the case for Fortune 500. But among the fortune 10, most CEOs/C-Suite are engineers with long tenures at the company.

Actually, if you look back at some of the most influential companies in the Valley at their peak, that's been a rule of thumb since the Fairchild days. Andrew Grove is an example of that [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove