The craze to bring in outside CEOs reached its peak in Silicon Valley in the bubble era when the "goal" of many of the dot-com startups became one of packaging

The craze to bring in outside CEOs reached its peak in Silicon Valley in the bubble era when the "goal" of many of the dot-com startups became one of packaging themselves for a quick IPO exit - in such an environment, bringing on a "big name" CEO who had taken one or more previous companies public became indispensable to the packaging process - so much so that startups were routinely willing to give as much as 7% of their stock immediately prior to the IPO to such persons just to get their name value added to the offering. That trend (at least in its reflexive and frenzied form of "let's automatically dump the founder CEO once we get to the stage where we need a real CEO") died with the IPO craze that accompanied it and this wonderful piece explains why it met a well-deserved end - you need to build real value for something lasting to come of it and those who have the vision to found companies and build innovative products are very often best positioned to build such value and to guide that process.