zlacker

Ability to be a hacker or researcher is not on the list of important CEO skills. If I had to collect my (totally unqualified) opinion of most-important skills of a good CEO, I would say:

- Ability to promote a company vision (even if you didn’t invent that vision)

- Ability to recognize and recruit excellent high-level leaders

- Ability to raise money by selling a company vision and instill confidence in investors

- Ability to sell product at the highest levels (e.g manage acquisition, sell to ultra-large organizations, get special gov treatment, whatever “big” sale matters most to the company)

- Ability to crisis manage in the short and long run

As far as I can tell, Sam had a lot of experience in the above in his time at YC and his own startup. On top of this, he had enough connections to get him into the pool of candidates and it looks like a lot of very smart/powerful people in SV are impressed by him when they meet or work with him. Seems like a very good choice to lead to me.

I know it’s Silicon Valley koolaide that good hackers == good CEOs, but it’s not true.

>>HEmanZ+(OP)
Good comment. I think having strong technical skills is one way to be a CEO (Jenson, Satya, Collison brothers, Drew Houston, Zuch, etc) but my bias is showing and you're absolutely right, those skills are very important, especially if the team is already stacked with amazing technical leadership (Like Ilya Sutskever).