[runako]

Judged by earnings and general business success (not "do tech people like what they are doing?"):

- Steve Ballmer @ Microsoft

- Tim Cook @ Apple

- Sundar Pichai @ Google (MechE by education)

- Elon Musk @ Tesla (he is not an auto engineer, so functions as the monied management)

There are a lot more examples out there. However, recent vintages of tech unicorns have been slower to replace founders in part due to dual-class stock structures that can give founders final veto over shareholder actions.

[ww520]

Steve Ballmer work in Microsoft since 1980 years as employee 30th, arguably part of the founding team. I won't say he's a bean counter and couldn't relate to the products.

[runako]

Fair enough, the rest of the comment stands without Ballmer. I chose him because in some ways he was chosen by Gates because he is a bean counter. :-)

[tanseydavid]

"Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!"

[cvalka]

You must be delusional to cite Steve Ballmer. Steve had cost Microsoft a couple of hundreds billions of dollars.

[fidgewidge]

How much of that was just competently running companies that already had massive growth momentum behind them?

[runako]

> just competently running companies

"Just" is doing some heavy lifting there, as if it's "just" easy to run a trillion-dollar company with tens of thousands of employees spread around the globe.

It's tech & tech changes fast. It would be relatively easy to generate a list of companies that had massive growth momentum that then stumbled when handed off to new management. All of those businesses have faced serious challenges (most recently: the pandemic & high inflation), and their managements have performed well nonetheless.

[AdrianB1]

Except for Elon Musk, who is/was extremely passionate about the product, the names on the list are not the peak of these companies. Steve Balmer performed reasonably at Microsoft after Gates, Tim Cook arguably after Steve Jobs and Google is lately a hit or miss on many fronts.

[runako]

> Judged by earnings and general business success

I chose these leaders specifically because their tenures saw their companies earn tons more money than when the founders were in charge.

For example: Jobs was visionary, but Cook's tenure has seen the launch/expansion of the Wearables segment and the Services segment. Those two are "only" a minority of Apple's revenues, but together form a business larger than Comcast or Meta or Target. Tech people won't give Cook credit for that accomplishment, but that's the point of this thread. :-)