4 ms·

Mark Andreessen, paraphrased: "Salespeople can be very good at optimizing a company over a 2-4 year period. The [Andreessen-Horowitz] fake hedge fund trade is:

• moron 14y ago
  Interesting but Tim Cook is not a "sales guy"
  • bedris 14y ago
    From Apple's website: "Before being named CEO in August 2011, Tim was Apple's Chief Operating Officer and was responsible for all of the company’s worldwide sales and operations..." How does being responsible for all of the company's worldwide sales make Tim Cook not a sales guy?
    • iProject 14y ago
      "Chief Operating Officer" goes far beyond sales. Creation of the Apple supply-management strategies is one example of a domain that was far beyond sales.
    • AllenKids 14y ago
      Phil Schiller is the "sales guy" at Apple, titled SVP of global marketing. Funnily enough, Steve Jobs himself is many times referred to, derogatorily, a master salesman even to this day.
• JumpCrisscross 14y ago
  Just for fun I went through a small sample of US companies who changed from technologist-led to MBA-led; this trade is garbage. Sometimes facts make inconvenient clever quips.
  • robterrell 14y ago
    I don't doubt you, but I'd love to see your small sample. The quip feels right to me, but I'm biased and would like some facts.
    • nswanberg 14y ago
      Same here, though I am more interested in how one could quickly collect a list of companies that have undergone that specific leadership change. Proprietary or public database? Google? Old-fashioned human memory?
      • JumpCrisscross 14y ago
        Bloomberg (8K(date of change in executive management) + bios(presence of "MBA" after exec without and at least a B.S.; finance, accounting, marketing, etc. excluded) | Jensen's alpha over IWM and sector SPDR over [0,2) versus [2,5)) -> R. Russell 2000 members 2006-2012. Bias may be introduced from these all being large, public companies - I don't know if VC-backed companies led by engineers v ops guys have a different story. I didn't dig very deep to try and see if I could remove noise, but TL;DR too much noise and drawdown at the outset. Disclaimer: I'm not an MBA and don't intend on getting one. That being said, I've noticed Silicon Valley discounts solid operations knowledge as much as Wall Street tends to discount the difference between a hacker and an okay coder. Andreesen is a smart man and was probably making a rallying cry/culture call rather than an analytic one with this line.
  • tatsuke95 14y ago
    On this board "an MBA" is used generally and pejoratively.
  • Drbble 14y ago
    Why did you change from Sales to MBA, which isya very different things. Fiorina is a salesperson. Cook is not.