PALO ALTO, Calif.–How do you view the IT function within your credit union: as just support for management, or management itself? One of Silicon Valley’s best-known venture capitalists says companies should take their top IT expert sitting by the wall at the next board meeting and put them in charge.
Marc Andreessen, tech entrepreneur and co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, offered a warning in an interview with Fortune that current C-suites in most big companies will “struggle to unlearn all that they have learned,” so the best approach is to simply pass on the baton to a digital native who has an inquisitive mind open to new ideas, according to Fortune.com.
“Find the smartest technologist in the company and make them CEO,” Andreessen told McKinsey's The Quarterly Interview: Provocations to Ponder, Fortune.com reported.
“Incumbent companies are no better at judging transformational technology than they were in the first internet boom, he warned,” according to Fortune.com. “Rather than having ingrained culture found in a true tech company, they tend to end up with a digital department that has one person who’s a technologist.”
Fortune noted that many organizations are still inclined to think the current bear market will shake out high-growth, high-risk tech companies and that therefore they can go back to business as usual.
Same Old, Same Old
“Big, classic Fortune 500 companies have the same problem they had 20 years ago. I thought the problem would shrink over time, but I’m not sure it has,” Andreessen said, according to Fortune.com. “The true technologists inside so many big companies are not the primary people at the company. They’re not treated as first-class citizens.”
Andreessen was quoted as saying he can always tell if there’s a real one in the room when he’s meeting with a board to discuss transformative trends like artificial intelligence and decentralized finance.
The technologists are the ones sitting against the wall nodding their head, he said: “They’re thinking, ‘Finally, somebody is showing up and actually saying this to these people. Maybe they’ll finally get it,” according to Fortune.com.
An Automotive Example
To illustrate his point, Fortune.com noted Andreessen picked the rise of Tesla, a company run by a technologist, that displaced incumbent carmakers.
“Whereas a company like General Motors built a reputation on elevating MBAs from their treasury department to the top jobs to cater to Wall Street's quarterly forecasts, Elon Musk has put all of his attention on building the best product even if it meant years of steady losses,” Fortune.com stated.