[nazca]

David Marcus is perhaps the poster child for failing up. He started a mobile payments company that was acquired by PayPal. The product was later discontinued and generated no value for PayPal.

He ended up as the PayPal CEO. IMHO as a PP employee at the time, he was clearly out of his depth in that job. It was abundantly clear he did not have the toolkit to run a large complex business. He then left abruptly to join facebook.

At Facebook he started this thing that did nothing but burn money and generate negative headlines.

If there was a metric that was the value created for the companies you work for vs. the money you personally earned I think his would be an outlier.

[goldenchrome]

I believe that people who are willing to put their neck out there as a high profile leader AND are able inspire others to get to work on a bold vision are rare. I believe those are the sought after qualities in a tech leader.

It doesn’t matter if his last 3 projects failed. They were all ambitious and he got people to work on them. Many businesses run themselves on inertia alone and you just need people to keep working. He will find another job.

[adam_arthur]

Results should be what's assessed. A lot of analysis around ideal leaders focuses on the "inputs" instead of the outputs.

Of course, important to understand and try to correctly attribute what factors led to success or failure.

But if a charismatic, visionary leader chooses to pursue projects that don't have a hope of succeeding, I don't see that as a success.

That being said, don't know much about this guy's background. Maybe everything he's worked on were perfectly great ideas and failures were not due to his direction/leadership.

Anyway, I only comment on this because there's something of a bias to put extroverts/outspoken people into management roles, but I've found introverted people often do just as well. Of course always comes down to the individual.

[npunt]

I doubt you're arguing to quite this extreme, but just to explore what focusing solely on the outputs side looks ('only results matter'), this can have some unintended consequences.

A great example is surgeons deciding not to perform riskier surgeries, because their % success rates would get dinged. This means if you're a patient with a rare / difficult to treat condition, you may not be able to get life saving surgery. And looking at the counterfactual, by being so risk averse, advancement in the field is slower because experimental surgeries aren't attempted.

Another example is finance. It can be a pretty unscrupulous place because money is the only real success metric, and they outsource their conscience to regulatory bodies that are always a few steps behind. This can lead to some serious negative externalities while enriching those participating - pretty much the same criticism leveled at this guy. A sort of horseshoe theory in play here.

I totally agree the extraverts & outspoken have an advantage in (getting into) management roles, and it comes down to the individual. So many factors related to learning from failure, luck, entrepreneur:market match, etc to consider.

[ethbr0]

> I believe that people who are willing to put their neck out there as a high profile leader AND are able inspire others to get to work on a bold vision are rare. I believe those are the sought after qualities in a tech leader.

> It doesn’t matter if his last 3 projects failed. They were all ambitious and he got people to work on them. Many businesses run themselves on inertia alone and you just need people to keep working.

This reads like a CV for Elizabeth Holmes and Ramesh Balwani.

[malermeister]

Having worked under him, I did it _despite_ him, not because of him.

Personally, I thought he had an air of arrogance that was highly off-putting.

[webmaven]

> It doesn’t matter if his last 3 projects failed. They were all ambitious and he got people to work on them.

Just getting people to work on your projects isn't necessarily that hard as long as you pay them market rates. Or they are young and naive.

If you're looking for evidence of visionary leadership, it kind of matters who, specifically, you're getting to work on your projects (because the folks you want all have their pick of places paying market rates), and it really makes a statement if highly competent folks are being paid below market rates in return for equity.

[hatenberg]

Other highlights include years of Messenger dallying and feature creep and abandonment causing the app to be rewritten and all work for years lost the moment he moved out of the org and M, the voice assistant that got killed soon as well.