Jensen Huang at NVIDIA. Satya Nadella at Microsoft. Bill Gates at Microsoft before him. Jeff Bezos started as a programmer. Elon Musk wrote code for Zip2 and X.com.
The best CEOs came from engineering. Not sales. Not finance. Not MBA programs.
When you’ve built the thing you’re selling, you know what’s possible and what’s bullshit. You can’t fool an engineer CEO with vaporware promises or impossible timelines.
Jensen Huang spent decades in chip design before running NVIDIA. When his team tells him a GPU architecture will take three years, he knows if that’s realistic or if they’re padding the estimate. When competitors announce breakthrough specs, he knows if it’s achievable or marketing fiction.
Satya Nadella was an engineer at Microsoft for years before becoming CEO. He understood Azure’s technical challenges firsthand. When the cloud team said they needed to rebuild the networking stack, he got it. No translation needed.
Non-technical CEOs rely on second-hand information. They trust reports, presentations, slide decks. Engineer CEOs read the code, understand the architecture, and know when something doesn’t add up.
Engineers know the shortest path between idea and execution. They’ve built things. They know what takes a week versus what takes a quarter.
Non-technical CEOs add layers. Strategy docs. Feasibility studies. Executive approvals. Market research. By the time they’re ready to build, the opportunity is gone.
Engineer CEOs cut through the bureaucracy because they know what’s actually required to ship. They’ve done it before.
There are many successful non-technical CEOs. But for tech companies where the product is everything, I want a CEO who can read the code. That’s my bias.