Tech Ceo Quotes

When we pair modern tech like Blockchain technology, cryptography and data analytics with the ancient practice of bartering, a lot of business opportunities emerge.

There’s nothing wrong with a CEO who can sell, but if he actually looks like a salesman, he’s probably bad at sales and worse at tech.

In a company where tech decisions were still ultracentralized, the repercussions of a distracted CEO had to be damaging.

invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit—got

Carly Fiorina took over Hewlett-Packard shortly before the tech bubble burst. Anne Mulcahy got a shot at being the first female CEO at Xerox—precisely as the company was being investigated by the SEC. What do these leaders have in common? They are women. Women who were given big responsibilities right as the shit hit the fan. Which meant that when they failed—almost inevitably—the problem was blamed on them, not the surrounding circumstances.

REINHOLD JOBS. Wisconsin-born Coast Guard seaman who, with his wife, Clara, adopted Steve in 1955. REED JOBS. Oldest child of Steve Jobs and Laurene Powell. RON JOHNSON. Hired by Jobs in 2000 to develop Apple’s stores. JEFFREY KATZENBERG. Head of Disney Studios, clashed with Eisner and resigned in 1994 to cofound DreamWorks SKG. ALAN KAY. Creative and colorful computer pioneer who envisioned early personal computers, helped arrange Jobs’s Xerox PARC visit and his purchase of Pixar. DANIEL KOTTKE. Jobs’s closest friend at Reed, fellow pilgrim to India, early Apple employee. JOHN LASSETER. Cofounder and creative force at Pixar. DAN’L LEWIN. Marketing exec with Jobs at Apple and then NeXT. MIKE MARKKULA. First big Apple investor and chairman, a father figure to Jobs. REGIS MCKENNA. Publicity whiz who guided Jobs early on and remained a trusted advisor. MIKE MURRAY. Early Macintosh marketing director. PAUL OTELLINI. CEO of Intel who helped switch the Macintosh to Intel chips but did not get the iPhone business. LAURENE POWELL. Savvy and good-humored Penn graduate, went to Goldman Sachs and then Stanford Business School, married Steve Jobs in 1991. GEORGE RILEY. Jobs’s Memphis-born friend and lawyer. ARTHUR ROCK. Legendary tech investor, early Apple board member, Jobs’s father figure. JONATHAN “RUBY” RUBINSTEIN. Worked with Jobs at NeXT, became chief hardware engineer at Apple in 1997. MIKE SCOTT. Brought in by Markkula to be Apple’s president in 1977 to try to manage Jobs.

This was a huge red flag, because real technologists wear T-shirts and jeans. So we instituted a blanket rule: pass on any company whose founders dressed up for pitch meetings. Maybe we still would have avoided these bad investments if we had taken the time to evaluate each company’s technology in detail. But the team insight—never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit—got us to the truth a lot faster. The best sales is hidden. There’s nothing wrong with a CEO who can sell, but if he actually looks like a salesman, he’s probably bad at sales and worse at tech.

By 1996 Apple’s share of the market had fallen to 4% from a high of 16% in the late 1980s. Michael Spindler, the German-born chief of Apple’s European operations who had replaced Sculley as CEO in 1993, tried to sell the company to Sun, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard. That failed, and he was ousted in February 1996 and replaced by Gil Amelio, a research engineer who was CEO of National Semiconductor. During his first year the company lost $1 billion, and the stock price, which had been $70 in 1991, fell to $14, even as the tech bubble was pushing other stocks into the stratosphere.

many tech CEOs strictly regulate their own children’s technology use. When New York Times reporter Nick Bilton talked to Apple cofounder and CEO Steve Jobs in late 2010, he asked Jobs if his kids loved the iPad. “They haven’t used it,” Jobs said. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.” Bilton was shocked, but he later found that many other tech experts also limited their children’s screen time, from the cofounder of Twitter to the former editor of Wired magazine. So even people who love technology—and make a living off it—are cautious about their kids using it too much. As Adam Alter put it in his book Irresistible, “It seemed as if the people producing tech products were following the cardinal rule of drug dealing: Never get high on your own supply.

At a young age, Evan would listen in on his father’s long legal calls, which he credits for giving him early business exposure that helped develop his critical thinking and business accumen. He can often become obsessed with ideas, hungrily learning everything he can about them at a rapid pace. Evan is constantly curious and is learning and getting better at being a CEO very quickly. But his two superpowers are (1) his ability to get inside his users’ heads and think like a teenage girl and (2) his knack for attracting brilliant, powerful mentors. Evan loves picking other people’s brains over a walk or a meal. Over the years he has attracted an A-list roster of mentors, including SoftBank’s Nikesh Arora, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Google’s Eric Schmidt. He doesn’t just limit these brain dumps to tech luminaries, though, as he often walks and chats with fashion designers, politicians, documentary filmmakers, and other intriguing peers. Often, these impressive people will come speak to Team Snapchat at their Venice headquarters.

Maybe the money would spread out a little bit. Maybe the people building the tools could have a say in how those tools were used. Maybe we shouldn’t all be so quick to identify with charismatic CEOs, maybe we shouldn’t assume that the money and the perks and the job market would be there forever, maybe we should factor in the possibility that we might age out. What were we doing anyway, helping people become billionaires? Billionaires were the mark of a sick society, they shouldn’t exist. There was no moral structure in which such a vast accumulation of wealth should be acceptable.

Disparity, Education and Economy Every dollar spent on luxury is a dollar of disparity. Citizens of earth could force big tech to pay their employees fair wages tomorrow, if they just stop buying their fancy, overpriced products and go for humbler alternatives unless the companies bring down their disparities in salary. The CEO may enjoy certain benefits of their position, but not until those working at the bottom can afford the fundamentals of life for their family. I'll say it to you plainly. An employee wronged is a company wronged. You see, trying to build a disparity-free economy pursuing revenue is like trying to achieve pregnancy through vasectomy. So long as greed drives the economy, it's not economy, but catastrophe. So long as greed drives the industries, it's not industrialization, it is vandalization. Ambition to climb the ladder of status so that you could be on the affluent side of disparity, is no ambition of a civilized human, it's the ambition of a caveman. So, before you pursue an ambition in life, educate yourself on a civilized definition of ambition. Yet the situation in our world is so pathetic that that's exactly the kind of ambition educational institutes sell. Schools and universities don't teach you to build a civilized society free from disparity, they teach you clever tactics to be on the affluent side of disparity. This is not education, this is castration. Concern for the society should be the bedrock of education - collective welfare should be the bedrock of economy - if not, we might as well start living as hobos on the streets, because with greed as the driving principle of education and economy, sooner or later all of us will end up on the streets.

Months later, Time magazine would run its now infamous article bragging about how it had been done. Without irony or shame, the magazine reported that “[t]here was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” creating “an extraordinary shadow effort” by a “well-funded cabal of powerful people” to oppose Trump.112 Corporate CEOs, organized labor, left-wing activists, and Democrats all worked together in secret to secure a Biden victory. For Trump, these groups represented a powerful Washington and Democratic establishment that saw an unremarkable career politician like Biden as merely a vessel for protecting their self-interests. Accordingly, when Trump was asked whom he blames for the rigging of the 2020 election, he quickly responded, “Least of all Biden.” Time would, of course, disingenuously frame this effort as an attempt to “oppose Trump’s assault on democracy,” even as Time reporter Molly Ball noted this shadow campaign “touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding.” The funding enabled the country’s sudden rush to mail-in balloting, which Ball described as “a revolution in how people vote.”113 The funding from Democratic donors to public election administrators was revolutionary. The Democrats’ network of nonprofit activist groups embedded into the nation’s electoral structure through generous grants from Democratic donors. They helped accomplish the Democrats’ vote-by-mail strategy from the inside of the election process. It was as if the Dallas Cowboys were paying the National Football League’s referee staff and conducting all of their support operations. No one would feel confident in games won by the Cowboys in such a scenario. Ball also reported that this shadowy cabal “successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.” And yet, Time magazine made this characterization months after it was revealed that the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s corrupt deal-making with Chinese and other foreign officials—deals that alleged direct involvement from Joe Biden, resulting in the reporting’s being overtly censored by social media—was substantially true. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey would eventually tell Congress that censoring the New York Post and locking it out of its Twitter account over the story was “a mistake.” And the Hunter Biden story was hardly the only egregious mistake, to say nothing of the media’s willful dishonesty, in the 2020 election. Republicans read the Time article with horror and as an admission of guilt. It confirmed many voters’ suspicions that the election wasn’t entirely fair. Trump knew the article helped his case, calling it “the only good article I’ve read in Time magazine in a long time—that was actually just a piece of the truth because it was much deeper than that.

A company’s revenue engine is a critical success factor. I had seen from my own direct experience how easy it was to get caught in silos: marketing people would just think of marketing, salespeople would just think of sales, and accounting wouldn’t think of itself as part of the revenue engine at all. Furthermore, product and the revenue engine were too often thought of completely independent of each other. The need for a more integrated approach was on my mind from the beginning. The revenue engine is a whole system. It encompasses a diverse set of integrated components, each doing its part to advance the system’s purpose. The engine is not just comprised of marketing and sales— it includes product, accounting, and the underlying technology and data infrastructure required to keep everything flowing. It involves people, tools, workflow, and metrics. Its purpose is to optimize reach, conversion, and expansion of customer spend. I call my revenue engine model “the bowtie schema.” It was the product of continuous iteration. As I interacted with marketing and sales practitioners and waded through the research, the model slowly emerged. The final model conveys not just the product and customer journey across the bowtie, but also the foundational layers that support that journey-- the interaction between people tools, workflow, and metrics that make it all happen. The most basic question a CEO must answer is whether the product has achieved a value breakthrough. Without that, the revenue engine is irrelevant. Once product-market fit is confirmed, the next step is to clearly identify your ideal customer profile (ICP) and your business model. This includes the lifetime value (LTV) profile of your company. Assuming a strong product, a clear ICP, and a solid understanding of the constraints composed by your unit economics, the path forward is clear. Then, the focus will turn to uplifting the maturity of your revenue engine and scaling it efficiently.

The most basic question a CEO must answer is whether the product has achieved a value breakthrough. Without that, the revenue engine is irrelevant. Once product-market fit is confirmed, the next step is to clearly identify your ideal customer profile (ICP) and your business model. This includes the lifetime value (LTV) profile of your company. Assuming a strong product, a clear ICP, and a solid understanding of the constraints composed by your unit economics, the path forward is clear. Then, the focus will turn to uplifting the maturity of your revenue engine and scaling it efficiently.

It is a matter of legal record that, for years, the CEOs of Apple, Intel, Google, Pixar, and other Silicon Valley firms operated something very much like a cartel against their own employees. In a scandal that journalists now call “the Techtopus,” these worthies agreed to avoid recruiting one another’s tech workers and thus keep those workers’ wages down across the industry. In 2007, in one of the most famous chapters of the Techtopus story, the famous innovator Steve Jobs emailed Eric Schmidt, demanding that this CEO and friend of top Democrats do something about a Google recruiter who was trying to lure an employee away from Apple. Two days later, according to the reporter who has studied the case most comprehensively, Schmidt wrote back to Jobs to tell him the recruiter had been fired. Jobs then forwarded Schmidt’s email around with this comment appended: “:)

The tech start-up world from which Musk hails embraces disruption as one of its organizing principles, encouraged in part by the influential blog TechCrunch, which named its flagship conference, TechCrunch Disrupt, for the concept. Silicon Valley’s budding capitalists have long been encouraged to use their software prowess and processes to disrupt existing industries, and hence we have Facebook, which disrupted the news media industry, Airbnb, which disrupted hotels, and crowdfunding, which disrupted traditional investing. When Ted Craver asked Musk to share his thoughts on disruption with an audience of old-school electricity providers, you could see why the chairman might nervously fiddle with his pen. Could Tesla, with its emerging energy-storage business, disrupt the utilities? It might have come as some comfort to those at the conference that Musk is no fan of disruption. Indeed, he and Straubel were probably there to convince utilities to work with Tesla on energy storage projects that could benefit both parties. But the industry’s fear that it might have been on the wrong side of history would not have dissipated completely. The same was true for at least one auto industry leader. The man who, until May 2017, was CEO of the Ford Motor Company is one person who does appear to be a fan of disruption. Mark Fields, a Harvard business grad and Clayton Christensen follower, was fifty-three when he was appointed to succeed outgoing CEO Alan Mulally.

Thought Leadership “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future” Book by Ashlee Vance “Take risks now and do something bold. You won’t regret it.” - Elon Musk (CEO of SpaceX and Tesla) #smitanairjain #leadership #womenintech #thoughtleaders #tedxspeaker #technology #tech #success #strategy #startuplife #startupbusiness #startup #mentor #leaders #itmanagement #itleaders #innovation #informationtechnology #influencers #Influencer #hightech #fintechinfluencer #fintech #entrepreneurship #entrepreneurs #economy #economics #development #businessintelligence #business

Around $300,000 of the total $600,000 that was raised by Augur's funding team comes from a man named Joe Costello. Costello is a successful tech entrepreneur, known to be one of Steve Jobs' top picks for the new CEO position of Apple itself. Following the smart money isn’t always a dumb idea. Gambling or casino are terms never used by Joey Krug, a young Pomona college dropout, but also Augur's lead developer. He and the small team of just five employees use the term “prediction market.” Due

During a time in which clean-tech businesses have gone bankrupt with alarming regularity, Musk has built two of the most successful clean-tech companies in the world. The Musk Co. empire of factories, tens of thousands of workers, and industrial might has incumbents on the run and has turned Musk into one of the richest men in the world, with a net worth around $10 billion. The visit to

The Hoover experiment, in the end, hardly realized the happy fantasies about the Engineer King. A very different version of this dream, however, has come to fruition, in the form of the CEOs of the big tech companies. We’re not ruled by engineers, not yet, but they have become the dominant force in American life, the highest, most influential tier of our elite.

Product evangelism is, as Guy Kawasaki put it years ago, “selling the dream.” It's helping people imagine the future and inspiring them to help create that future. If you're a startup founder, a CEO, or a head of product, this is a very big part of your job, and you'll have a hard time assembling a strong team if you don't get good at it.

He was now the CEO of Distance Communications, a hi-tech manufacturer of the electronic components for various weapons systems, part of that immense gray world of military contracting where billions were made and little was publicly known.

I think what’s occurring is a stealthy rebranding: the word ‘problem’ has become too emotionally loaded to be uttered in polite company in case we think bad things about the companies responsible. So software bugs are now issues rather than problems, even if they stop our computers working and ruin our day. Or, for my CEO, the bug is an opportunity. He was in the software business, and the only opportunity a broken computer gives you is the opportunity to wait for tech support to call back. We now have ‘performance issues’ with staff who fall asleep on their keyboard, or ‘brand issues’ with companies that nobody likes, or, worst of all, ‘balance sheet issues’, as described by Lehman Brothers, shortly before it ceased to be Lehman Brothers. At least they didn’t call it a ‘balance sheet opportunity’, though I bet someone suggested it. Rule of thumb on issues: it doesn’t matter whether your company admits to balance sheet issues or problems, it still might be time to send out your CV.

The successful CEOs I have seen are ones that never give up. Even when I am telling them 'you really need to consider giving up'.

How rational is it to risk the future of humankind on the assumption that future scientists will make some unknown planet-saving discoveries? Most of the presidents, ministers and CEOs who run the world are very rational people. Why are they willing to take such a gamble? Maybe because they don't think they are gambling on their own personal future. Even if bad comes to worse and science cannot hold off the deluge, engineers could still build a hi-tech Noah's Ark for the upper caste, while leaving billions of others to drown. The belief in this hi-tech Ark is currently one of the biggest threats to the future of humankind and of the entire ecosystem. People who believe in the hi-tech Ark should not be put in charge of the global ecology, for the same reason that people who believe in a heavenly afterlife should not be given nuclear weapons.

CEOs at Facebook, Twitter, and other social-media networks don’t use their own products the way the rest of us do, prioritizing privacy and control of their time.

Initially working out of our home in Northern California, with a garage-based lab, I wrote a one page letter introducing myself and what we had and posted it to the CEOs of twenty-two Fortune 500 companies. Within a couple of weeks, we had received seventeen responses, with invitations to meetings and referrals to heads of engineering departments. I met with those CEOs or their deputies and received an enthusiastic response from almost every individual. There was also strong interest from engineers given the task of interfacing with us. However, support from their senior engineering and product development managers was less forthcoming. We learned that many of the big companies we had approached were no longer manufacturers themselves but assemblers of components or were value-added reseller companies, who put their famous names on systems that other original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) had built. That didn't daunt us, though when helpful VPs of engineering at top-of-the-food-chain companies referred us to their suppliers, we found that many had little or no R & D capacity, were unwilling to take a risk on outside ideas, or had no room in their already stripped-down budgets for innovation. Our designs found nowhere to land. It became clear that we needed to build actual products and create an apples-to-apples comparison before we could interest potential manufacturing customers. Where to start? We created a matrix of the product areas that we believed PAX could impact and identified more than five hundred distinct market sectors-with potentially hundreds of thousands of products that we could improve. We had to focus. After analysis that included the size of the addressable market, ease of access, the cost and time it would take to develop working prototypes, the certifications and metrics of the various industries, the need for energy efficiency in the sector, and so on, we prioritized the list to fans, mixers, pumps, and propellers. We began hand-making prototypes as comparisons to existing, leading products. By this time, we were raising working capital from angel investors. It's important to note that this was during the first half of the last decade. The tragedy of September 11, 2001, and ensuing military actions had the world's attention. Clean tech and green tech were just emerging as terms, and energy efficiency was still more of a slogan than a driver for industry. The dot-com boom had busted. We'd researched venture capital firms in the late 1990s and found only seven in the United States investing in mechanical engineering inventions. These tended to be expansion-stage investors that didn't match our phase of development. Still, we were close to the famous Silicon Valley and had a few comical conversations with venture capitalists who said they'd be interested in investing-if we could turn our technology into a website. Instead, every six months or so, we drew up a budget for the following six months. Via a growing network of forward-thinking private investors who could see the looming need for dramatic changes in energy efficiency and the performance results of our prototypes compared to currently marketed products, we funded the next phase of research and business development.

Consider a forecast Steve Ballmer made in 2007, when he was CEO of Microsoft: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.” Ballmer’s forecast is infamous. Google “Ballmer” and “worst tech predictions”—or “Bing” it, as Ballmer would prefer—and you will see it enshrined in the forecasting hall of shame, along with such classics as the president of Digital Equipment Corporation declaring in 1977 that “there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” And that seems fitting because Ballmer’s forecast looks spectacularly wrong. As the author of “The Ten Worst Tech Predictions of All Time” noted in 2013, “the iPhone commands 42% of US smartphone market share and 13.1% worldwide.”1 That’s pretty “significant.” As another journalist wrote, when Ballmer announced his departure from Microsoft in 2013, “The iPhone alone now generates more revenue than all of Microsoft.”2

Among the many private initiatives in this field, the latest, launched in the summer of 2012, is aimed at middle-school female students in New York. Girls who Code is a seminar, hosted by a startup (AppNexus in 2012), where 13-17 year-old girls learn how to write software programs, design websites, and build applications. Mainly, they learn that these subjects are fun and accessible to them, and not only to male computer geeks. “Girls who Code is not just a program, it's a movement to close the sexist gap in the technological sector,” explained the program’s two organizers, Reshma Saujani and Kristen Titus, to attendees of a big gala that took place on the evening of Oct. 22, 2012 on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The occasion was to celebrate the success of the first edition of Girls Who Code and collect additional funds in support of the initiative. The first 20 “graduates” of the course spoke of their experience and their dreams for the future, while sitting at the gigantic table in the NYSE’s Board Room. Tomorrow, one of them could return as the CEO of a high-tech business, and perhaps ring the bell on the trading floor to inaugurate her company’s Initial Public Offering.

As Facebook kept evolving—and growing faster with every change—the established powers of the technology and media world began paying ever closer attention. This appeared to be the kind of irresistible consumer website every executive had dreamed of owning since the Internet took off in the mid-1990s. Mark Zuckerberg suddenly had a lot of new older, well-dressed friends from Los Angeles and the East Coast. But he didn’t think like the CEO of an established technology or media company. He barely gave a thought to profit and was still ambivalent about advertising. This wasn’t easy for his newfound suitors to understand. One senior executive from a tech company recalls a frustrating visit during that time with Zuckerberg, who seemed uninterested in increasing the company’s revenue. “He didn’t know what he didn’t know,” he says. “But when he opened his mouth he was very direct, very smart, and he was very focused on Facebook as a social tool, to the point of naïveté. It sounded just too altruistic at the time. So I asked him, ‘Is it a social tool as a tactic to get to the next point?’ And he says, ‘No, all I really care about is doing this social tool.’ So I thought, ‘Either this guy is being very strategic and not telling me what his next thing is, or he’s just got his sandbox and he’s playing in it.’ I couldn’t figure it out.

The best sales is hidden. There’s nothing wrong with a CEO who can sell, but if he actually looks like a salesman, he’s probably bad at sales and worse at tech.

Right now, we track about 60 different efforts around the world to develop improved batteries and some of them hold some long-term promise. We rate all of them from one to five, where five is we should be doing business with them and one is complete BS.” Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, Tech Insider, 10th

As the old-school approach of command-and-control leadership fades, companies in all industries will inevitably move in the same direction as these tech firms, and try to tap into the deeper passions of employees.

One day, Aaron Levie, the twenty-six-year-old CEO of Box, a well-funded new tech company, tells me it’s really important to learn from what happened in the 1990s—which is why he has read a bunch of books about that era.

world until he was forty. Despite the late start, Bill eventually became the chairman and CEO of Intuit. Following that, he became a legend in high tech, mentoring great CEOs such as Steve Jobs of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Eric Schmidt of Google. Bill is extremely smart, super-charismatic, and

Liam Scott, an expert in tech marketing, thrives on driving innovation and fostering business growth. Through his digital strategies, he amplifies brand awareness and optimizes conversion rates, as the founder and CEO of a flourishing agency.

Customer‐centric culture. As Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon says, “Customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don't yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf.

Months before his Davos debut, Xi had struck a different tone in a speech to Chinese tech titans and Communist Party leaders in Beijing for a conference on “cyber security and informatization.” To an audience that included Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, Alibaba CEO Jack Ma, high-profile People’s Liberation Army (PLA) researchers, and most of China’s political elite, Xi exhorted China to focus on “gaining breakthroughs in core technology as quickly as possible.” Above all, “core technology” meant semiconductors. Xi didn’t call for a trade war, but his vision didn’t sound like trade peace, either. “We must promote strong alliances and attack strategic passes in a coordinated manner. We must assault the fortifications of core technology research and development…. We must not only call forth the assault, we must also sound the call for assembly, which means that we must concentrate the most powerful forces to act together, compose shock brigades and special forces to storm the passes.” Donald Trump, it turned out, wasn’t the only world leader who mixed martial metaphors with economic policy. The chip industry faced an organized assault by the world’s second-largest economy and the one-party state that ruled it.

Brian Dyson, former President and CEO of Coca-Cola Enterprises, gave at a Georgia Tech University commencement. He asked the audience to imagine life as a game in which you are juggling five balls in the air named work, family, health, friends, and spirit. He suggested that work is a rubber ball which if dropped will simply bounce back. The other four balls, he suggested, were made of glass. If you drop one, it will be forever scuffed, damaged, or even destroyed.

Product Vision and Strategy The product vision is what drives and inspires the company and sustains the company through the ups and downs. This may sound straightforward, but it's tricky. That's because there are two very different types of product leaders needed for two very different situations: Where there is a CEO or a founder who is the clear product visionary Where there is no clear product visionary—usually in situations where the founder has moved on

You know why there is so-much power outage in the world? Because the humans are unaware of their own electricity, both metaphorically and literally. And one who realizes their inner electricity and brings it out to electrify the whole world, is the true CEO of the world. I don't care for being the CEO of some puny anti-humanitarian company, for I am already a CEO - I am the CEO of planet earth - I am the Chief Evolution Officer of the human world - so is every single human whose responsibility towards society outweighs their primeval drive for narcissism and self-preservation. In every age, in every time, there'll come ten of us Chief Evolution Officers to make mincemeat of the megalomaniacal ploy of anti-humanitarian giants while driving human evolution in a humane direction.

A muscle ticked in his jaw. "Not easily. We need more computer power." I watched the map turning red. We need a lot more power. Dammit. "God, they're perfect for each other," Zane murmured. "There must be something we can do, " I said ignoring the billionaire. "I'm not letting that asshole win. I let Rayner pinch my ass to get that trojan on his phone." Mav's face turned to stone. "He what?" "Stay focused, big guy. We need to think." "No, we need more computer power. Luckily, I have that." My head whipped up. "At the Rivera Tech Park upstate." I gasped. "Oh my God, I've always wanted to see inside of that place." "Yes, perfect for each other," Liam whispered. Mav smiled. "Today's your lucky day, angel." "He's smiling again," Zane said. "I know, " Liam replied, "I'm still not used to it.

As CEO of a tech company, I knew exactly why a digital version was “necessary” and the ill that fact boded. I did all I could to warn people that it signaled the potential end of human liberty. In a video that went viral, I explained that digital as opposed to paper “vaccine passports” could require endless “updates” to stay valid. How did I know this? Because a digital product can be made to shut off.

This is the reason why a favorite buzzword in tech CEO circles is “disruptive.” The primary thing every digital company wants to “disrupt” is a human society from which they are not profiting. The more that tech platforms and policies are able to shut down human community, and restrict the freedom of humans, the wealthier the Big Tech corporations become.

As always, the bigger tech issue was that too few companies had way too much power over our democracy. We meant to build a distributed network where everyone would have a voice, and we ended up building centralized mega-platforms with CEOs who have the power of God.

Investment firms are buying up more vacation homes, aiming to cash in on growing demand from tourists and remote workers. Most vacation rental homes are owned by small-time owners who list their properties on websites such as Airbnb Inc., but the number of financial firms investing in the sector is growing. New York-based investment firm Saluda Grade is launching a venture with short-term- rental operator AvantStay Inc. to buy about $500 million of homes, the companies said Tuesday. Saluda Grade said it is also looking to raise debt by selling mortgage bonds backed by its homes to investors, the first vacation-rental mortgage securitization, according to the company. Andes STR, a startup that buys and manages short-term rental homes on behalf of investors, also recently signed a deal with Chilean investment firm WEG Capital to buy roughly $80 million of properties in the U.S., Andes said. These investors are betting they can get higher returns if they rent out homes by the night instead of by the year. Low-interest rates have made it more attractive to borrow and Buy Traditional Rental Homes, inflating property prices and making it harder for new buyers to turn a profit. That has prompted some institutions and wealthy families to look in more obscure corners of the property market where competition is smaller, investment advisers say. Some are turning to investments in vacation homes, where demand has surged in many places during the pandemic as more people choose to work from remote locations and leisure travel heated up last year. “There’s a lot more yield available in the short-term market,” said Saluda Grade’s chief executive, Ryan Craft. It is the latest sign of how the pandemic is changing the way people work and live, and how real-estate investors are angling to find new ways to profit from these shifts. Saluda Grade is targeting homes within driving distance of major population centers, Mr. Craft said. His company will buy the homes and AvantStay will manage them for a fee. But while vacation-rental homes can offer higher returns, they also pose challenges to investors. Mortgages are usually more expensive and harder to get for short-term rentals than for owner-occupied homes, said Giri Devanur, CEO of reAlpha Tech Corp., a startup that wants to pool money from small-time investors to buy short-term-rental homes.

Information Collecting The Deep State is a surveillance state. China is the surveillance capital of the world. Their citizens are monitored and traced with cameras using facial recognition as well as through their iPhones. Collecting and monitoring personal information in the United States includes data from your laptop camera and microphone. If you can see and speak to another person using an iPhone, then high-tech equipment can see, hear, and record you. Although denied, Siri can listen in not only when you say, “Hey Siri,” but as long as the small box is turned on. The camera and microphone on your home computer can be remotely accessed. Even certain types of alarm systems and certain infant security cameras can be hacked, enabling a person to see into your home. It is interesting that the CEOs of computer companies often place dark tape over their camera and microphone.

The original idea, favored by Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, was that every company should aim for a certain level of turnover, whatever the consequences. The system was rife with perverse incentives. Peers who sabotaged others’ work could save their own jobs; managers might hire less-capable people on their teams to keep from having to fire existing employees whom they favored. Despite the system’s drawbacks, Welch’s influence was so far-reaching that stack ranking was adopted at many of today’s tech giants, where it wreaked havoc on morale and productivity for decades. Eventually, its negative effects became well known enough to make the practice a liability at companies chasing workers whose specialized talents made them scarce, such as engineers. In the mid-2010s, companies including Google, Microsoft, and Amazon abandoned it.

Concurrent with all this, a massive new venture capital fund was being created by SoftBank, the Japanese tech conglomerate with stakes in Alibaba, Sprint, and others. CEO Masayoshi Son was on the verge of controlling a nearly $100 billion fund that was intended to rewrite the rules of investing in Silicon Valley and pick world-changing winners, infusing them with the kinds of cash that a generation ago would’ve seemed impossible in the private market. Goldman thought a meeting between Musk and Son might be fruitful. A matchmaker was found for the two: Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle. He lived near Son’s Silicon

There are essentially three ways for a product manager to work, and I argue only one of them leads to success: The product manager can escalate every issue and decision up to the CEO. In this model, the product manager is really a backlog administrator. Lots of CEOs tell me this is the model they find themselves in, and it's not scaling. If you think the product manager job is what's described in a Certified Scrum Product Owner class, you almost certainly fall into this category. The product manager can call a meeting with all the stakeholders in the room and then let them fight it out. This is design by committee, and it rarely yields anything beyond mediocrity. In this model, very common in large companies, the product manager is really a roadmap administrator. The product manager can do his or her job. The honest truth is that the product manager needs to be among the strongest talent in the company. My intention in this book is to convince you of this third way of working. It will take me the entire book to describe how the strong product manager does his or her job, but let me just say for now that this is a very demanding job and requires a strong set of skills and strengths.

Real transformations of major tech companies are extremely rare: I think because companies develop a particular capability, and a set of customers, and change is hard. You can’t take the stripes off a tiger. If you’re born a dog, you don’t die a cat.

For example, AllThingsD broke the story that new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer had secured a $1.1 billion acquisition of blogging platform Tumblr. It was a major scoop at the time with lots of details. Yahoo quickly followed with an official announcement that included the “promise not to screw it up.” They did. Eventually, Tumblr passed from Yahoo to Verizon and, in 2019, was purchased by Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Automattic’s WordPress, for $3 million.

never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit—got us to the truth a lot faster. The best sales is hidden.

Our mission, which we choose to accept, is to blow up the One Percent, who’ve earned their place in this world standing on the tired backs of the Ninety-nine. Step one: Destroy Big Tech. UrbanMyth is a wholly owned subsidiary of TallTale Media Corp., whose CEO was paid a seventeen-million-dollar bonus last year but denied workers the forty hours a week that would have entitled them to benefits. He wouldn’t let go of the brass ring, so it’s time to pry his greedy fingers off of it. Let this data dump be a warning to Big Tech everywhere—pay your workers a living wage or you’re next. Happy reading.

Stephen Hawking warned against the creation of artificial intelligence saying it could be mankind’s biggest mistake and expressed fears that it may enslave or exterminate us.488 Billionaire tech guru Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, warned that creating A.I. would be like “summoning a demon.”489 Microsoft founder Bill Gates has also expressed concern about it,490 as well as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak

Renn took a step in closer, a predatory gleam returning to his eyes. “Vigilante against the establishment and rich guy CEO with more connections than necessary? Bust out some fancy tech and you’re pretty much fae Batman.

Making the movie” is the term that a venture capitalist friend applies to the process of building a start-up. In my friend’s tech-company-as-movie analogy, the VCs are the producers and the CEO is the leading man. If possible, you try to get a star who looks like Mark Zuckerberg—young, preferably a college dropout, with maybe a touch of Asperger’s. You write a script—the “corporate narrative.” You have the origin myth, the eureka moment, and the hero’s journey, with obstacles to overcome, dragons to slay, markets to disrupt and transform. You invest millions to build the company—like shooting the movie—and then millions more to promote it and acquire customers. “By the time you get to the IPO, I want to see people lined up around the block waiting to get into the theater on opening night. That’s what the first day of trading is like. It’s the opening weekend for the film. If you do things right, you put asses in the seats, and you cash out.

I knew that Bill Campbell would be the critical person I’d need to persuade one way or another. Bill was the only one of our board members who had been a public company CEO. He knew the pros and cons better than anyone else. More important, everybody always seemed to defer to Bill in these kinds of sticky situations, because Bill had a special quality about him. At the time, Bill was in his sixties, with gray hair and a gruff voice, yet he had the energy of a twenty-year-old. He began his career as a college football coach and did not enter the business world until he was forty. Despite the late start, Bill eventually became the chairman and CEO of Intuit. Following that, he became a legend in high tech, mentoring great CEOs such as Steve Jobs of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Eric Schmidt of Google. Bill is extremely smart, super-charismatic, and elite operationally, but the key to his success goes beyond those attributes. In any situation—whether it’s the board of Apple, where he’s served for over a decade; the Columbia University Board of Trustees, where he is chairman; or the girls’ football team that he coaches—Bill is inevitably everybody’s favorite person. People offer many complex reasons for why Bill rates so highly. In my experience it’s pretty simple. No matter who you are, you need two kinds of friends in your life. The first kind is one you can call when something good happens, and you need someone who will be excited for you. Not a fake excitement veiling envy, but a real excitement. You need someone who will actually be more excited for you than he would be if it had happened to him. The second kind of friend is somebody you can call when things go horribly wrong—when your life is on the line and you only have one phone call. Who is it going to be? Bill Campbell is both of those friends.

This push for simplicity had a purpose. Even though he was a high-tech CEO, Steve could put himself in the shoes of customers, people who cared nothing for the ins and outs of the software industry. He never wanted Apple software to overload people, especially when they might already be stretched by the bustle of their everyday lives.

So what sort of signal does it send when a man as intelligent and thoughtful as Bill Bennett decides to contradict his entire body of work to support a man like Donald Trump? What value is left in intelligent reasoning? Donald Trump didn’t crash the guardrails of political and civil standards; rather, the highway officials eagerly removed the guardrails and stood by cheering as the lunatic behind the wheel drove the party straight off the cliff of reason. When a Williams College and Harvard Law grad like Bill Bennett considers a man who found the nuclear triad a puzzling mystery in a primary debate qualified to be president, the idiotocracy is in full ascendant. John F. Kennedy once held a dinner for all the living Nobel Prize laureates at the White House. Donald Trump invited the CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, to the White House so that he could complain about his Twitter account. Trump holds to a theory that there is some vast left-wing conspiracy in the tech world illuminati to personally slight him at every opportunity. But that’s just one of the many conspiracies that Trump embraces.

For an engineer in Silicon Valley, your day is something like this,” said 26-year-old tech entrepreneur Henry Pasternack.* “You get on a bus in the morning, and there are no women. You work in a department in which there are twenty men and one woman. You go to lunch, and there are some women—maybe they work in sales and marketing—but they’re all talking either to each other or to the CEO . . . For guys in tech, there’s

don’t think this is realistic,” he said. “The CEO would be an older white man.” My colleague and I agreed that might often be the case, but explained that we wanted to focus more on Linda’s needs and motivations than on how she looked. “Sorry, it’s just not believable,” he insisted. “We need to change it.” I squirmed in my Aeron chair. My colleague looked out the window. We’d lost that one, and we knew it. Back at the office, “Linda” became “Michael”—a suit-clad, salt-and-pepper-haired guy. But we kept Linda’s photo in the mix, swapping it to another profile so that our personas wouldn’t end up lily-white. A couple weeks later, we were back in that same conference room, where our client had asked us to share the revised personas with another member of his executive team. We were halfway through our spiel when executive number two cut us off. “So, you have a divorced black woman in a low-level job,” he said. “I have a problem with that.” Reader, I died. Looking back, both of these clients were right: most of the CEOs who were members of their organization were white men, and representing their members this way wasn’t a good plan for their future. But what they missed—because, I recognize now, our personas encouraged them to miss it—was that demographics weren’t the point. Differing motivations and challenges were the real drivers behind what these people wanted and how they interacted with the organization. We thought adding photos, genders, ages, and hometowns would give our personas a more realistic feel. And they did—just not the way we intended. Rather than helping folks connect with these people, the personas encouraged the team to assume that demographic information drove motivations—that

I’ll bet (a pretty penny)… Bet #1: Five of ten CEOs see training as an expense rather than an investment. Bet #2: Five of ten CEOs see training as defense rather than offense. Bet #3: Five of ten CEOs see training as a necessary evil rather than a strategic opportunity. I’ll bet (many, many a pretty penny)… Bet #4: Eight of ten CEOs, in a forty-five-minute tour d’horizon of their business, would NOT mention training.

Not long after, Adam left for vacation in Hanalei Bay, on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Hanalei Bay is a surfing mecca that maintains an eclectic vibe. The celebrities and CEOs who visit try to tread lightly. One morning, two start-up employees who worked at tech companies back on the mainland were paddling out to sea when they spotted Adam in the water nearby. He was flat on his board, holding on to a pair of ropes attached to the back of two surfboards, from which two local guides were pulling him out to the waves. It was the surfing equivalent of a cross-country skier holding on to someone else’s pole—or the start-up equivalent, his fellow surfers noted, of propelling yourself with a $100 billion venture capital cannon. Back in the Hamptons, Adam kept a motorized surfboard. A few days later, Adam was

Just remember that a mix is good. Decider Who makes decisions for your team? Perhaps it’s the CEO, or maybe it’s just the “CEO” of this particular project. If she can’t join for the whole time, make sure she makes a couple of appearances and delegates a Decider (or two) who can be in the room at all times. Examples: CEO, founder, product manager, head of design Finance expert Who can explain where the money comes from (and where it goes)? Examples: CEO, CFO, business development manager Marketing expert Who crafts your company’s messages? Examples: CMO, marketer, PR, community manager Customer expert Who regularly talks to your customers one-on-one? Examples: researcher, sales, customer support Tech/logistics expert Who best understands what your company can build and deliver? Examples: CTO, engineer Design expert Who designs the products your company makes? Examples: designer, product manager

invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit—got us to the truth a lot faster.

Decider Who makes decisions for your team? Perhaps it’s the CEO, or maybe it’s just the “CEO” of this particular project. If she can’t join for the whole time, make sure she makes a couple of appearances and delegates a Decider (or two) who can be in the room at all times. Examples: CEO, founder, product manager, head of design Finance expert Who can explain where the money comes from (and where it goes)? Examples: CEO, CFO, business development manager Marketing expert Who crafts your company’s messages? Examples: CMO, marketer, PR, community manager Customer expert Who regularly talks to your customers one-on-one? Examples: researcher, sales, customer support Tech/logistics expert Who best understands what your company can build and deliver? Examples: CTO, engineer Design expert Who designs the products your company makes? Examples: designer, product manager

Like many white male tech CEOs, he saw his companies as pure meritocracies, where hard work and smarts rose to the top. To Musk, diversity initiatives were antithetical to success, watering down his workforces with underqualified female or minority candidates and discriminating against white or male applicants.

Nvidia remains the only stand-alone graphics-chip firm to this day, even though hundreds of others have thrown their hats in the ring. Jensen himself is now the technology industry’s longest-serving CEO.

The findings were—and still are today—alarming. Based on the USTR report and research on technology transfers and intellectual property, Trump further restricted Chinese access to investment in the high-tech sector. In response, China retaliated with its own tariffs, and accused the United States government both of triggering the trade war and trying to slow China’s growth. This makes the continuation of the decoupling policy during Joe Biden’s administration all the more surprising. United States rhetoric and diplomacy have become milder and more authoritative, but their strategic substance in this area is strikingly similar to Biden’s predecessor: Punitive tariffs against China have remained almost unchanged. Biden even stepped up the pace slightly by compiling a blacklist of sixty Chinese companies in 2020—which he has continuously updated since then—that United States firms may no longer do business with. Shortly afterward, the United States joined the EU, Canada, and the UK in imposing sanctions on Chinese officials in connection with human rights abuses in Xinjiang. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States called on China to condemn the attack. China in turn blamed the United States for the war. A few weeks later, in May 2022, Chinese authorities and state-affiliated companies were told to replace American-made computers with domestic brands. Around fifty million computers were affected.