4 ms·

It's not about difficulty (though for the record, I would say that the restaurant industry is much more competitive than the AI industry and the management prob

It's not about difficulty (though for the record, I would say that the restaurant industry is much more competitive than the AI industry and the management problems are likely just as hard). The size of a company is very correlated with the value add between a good CEO and a bad CEO, or between a good CEO and a great CEO. It's the same reason why basketball players make more money than ping pong players. It's not that basketball is harder than ping pong, it's that way more people watch basketball so there is more money to be made by the team that has the best players. Because the CEO's decisions are leveraged by the scale of the business, big businesses are willing to pay top dollar for whoever they think has the best shot at running the company well. Of course, this judgement might be incorrect, because the world is hard to predict. Just because performance differences are less visible in CEOs than they are in basketball players doesn't mean the differences don't exist, or are less valuable.

soulbadguy 3y ago
> The size of a company is very correlated with the value add between a good CEO and a bad CEO, or between a good CEO and a great CEO. This is true for any other employee. If a dev optimize a code base by 1%, that 1% value add is correlated to the size of company : could 10$ for a small company or 1Mill for a large company. A company is a collective of individual working together to preduce (in general) more than just the the sum of the output of each individual. So it's normal that any individual output value would be a function of the collective output. However, the current social contract is that "regular" employee trade some of the upside of the synergy for less risk and more predictable compensation. The question is, why are we so comfortable treating the CEO any differently.
- highfrequency 3y ago
  When a software company gets 1000x bigger, there are 1000x more engineers. But there is still one CEO. The scaling of responsibility and impact is very different.

soulbadguy 3y ago

> The size of a company is very correlated with the value add between a good CEO and a bad CEO, or between a good CEO and a great CEO. This is true for any other employee. If a dev optimize a code base by 1%, that 1% value add is correlated to the size of company : could 10$ for a small company or 1Mill for a large company. A company is a collective of individual working together to preduce (in general) more than just the the sum of the output of each individual. So it's normal that any individual output value would be a function of the collective output. However, the current social contract is that "regular" employee trade some of the upside of the synergy for less risk and more predictable compensation. The question is, why are we so comfortable treating the CEO any differently.

highfrequency 3y ago
When a software company gets 1000x bigger, there are 1000x more engineers. But there is still one CEO. The scaling of responsibility and impact is very different.