This sounds suspiciously close to "dot.com CEOs don't need to know about software, they just need to hire programmers." It's a tricky idea because, in one very

This sounds suspiciously close to "dot.com CEOs don't need to know about software, they just need to hire programmers." It's a tricky idea because, in one very technical sense, it's actually true. The larger and more important truth it conceals is that a software company managed by someone who understands software is a completely different beast from a software company managed by an accountant. One of many obvious differences is that a CEO who isn't a programmer will have a very hard time evaluating the relative merits of potential hires (either front-line hires in a small organization, or technical leaders in a larger one). New technologies that are actually important as competitive advantages, and not yet widely distributed, aren't like little packets of soup mix one can throw into a meal. In practice you can't say "Oh, I read about nonlinear discombobulation transducers in Wired and now I'm going to tell my engineers to use them". By the time the knowledge is nugget-ized enough to be in a Wired article it's already way behind current research. The job of a CEO of a "hard tech" company is primarily to make choices about investing in new technologies and applying them in products. Does it really seem reasonable that someone who is merely "aware of" Professor X developing idea Y can make optimal decisions about those investments and applications? Is it plausible that Intel would be what it is today without Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce's knowledge of semiconductor physics?