Mark Zuckerberg Calls Out Tech Firms: No Technical Skills In Leadership? You're "Not A Technology Company"

Mark Zuckerberg has a blunt take on what makes a tech company legit. It's all about who's in charge. If they don't have technical skills? Well, then you might not be a real tech company at all.

Zuck got real on a recent “Acquired” podcast episode and didn't mince words. When he first hit Silicon Valley, he was floored by how many so-called tech companies had leaders who couldn't code to save their lives. “The CEO wasn't technical, the board of directors had no one technical on it, they had like one dude on the management team who was the head of engineering who was technical and everyone else wasn't,” he said. “If that's your team, then you're not a technology company.”

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He's not just throwing shade. Zuck's been there and done that. He built Facebook from scratch in his Harvard dorm room at 19. So, yeah, he knows what he's talking about.

At Meta, Zuck's made sure it's different. He's picky about who's running the show. “I think one of the things that I've always been pretty careful about is I actually want a lot of the people on our management team. It's split. It's mostly people running these big product groups who come up through different technical pathways at the company and I think there's a balance,” he said. He's also not naive. He understands that not everyone needs to be an engineer. “You don't want everyone to be an engineer because there are other things that matter too,” he added. “But if you don't have enough of your kind of share of the company as engineers, then you're not a technology company.”

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Just look at Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, Meta's CTO, the guy who invented Facebook's News Feed. Now, he's leading Meta's charge into the metaverse. Or Chris Cox, who joined Meta in 2005 as a software engineer. He's one of the brains behind the News Feed too. These are the kinds of people Zuck believes should be running the show.

It's not just about filling seats. It's about how these tech-savvy leaders shape the company's culture and decision-making. Zuck's point? “I think that also is important to the board in terms of how you weigh decisions and culturally things inside the company matter a lot.”

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But Zuck's not saying it's all about coding. He knows other skills matter. He's just saying that if you want to be a tech company, you better have some serious technical talent at the top.

In the same chat, Zuck got personal. He owned up to what he calls his “20-year mistake” of taking heat for stuff Meta didn't even cause. He also threw down the gauntlet, saying Apple will be Meta's biggest rival in the next decade.

Meta hasn't chimed in on the podcast yet, but one thing's clear: Zuck's laid down the law on what it takes to be a real tech company. And if your leadership is light on technical skills, it's time to rethink your playbook.

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