Want to call yourself a real tech company? Mark Zuckerberg says get a technical CEO

Mark Zuckerberg believes tech companies need technical expertise at a leadership level if they’re to truly live up to expectations, according to a live airing of the Acquired podcast.

The Meta CEO spoke about the question of product and technology, saying that businesses need to get the balance between them right and do both well.

“I think you can define the product in such a general way that the technology becomes basically impossible to solve. You want to have a smart product definition, but then you want to be competent and better than everyone else at the technology,” Zuckerberg said.

“I think that that's something that we've held ourselves to and built a good organization around,” he added.

When Zuckerberg first came to Silicon Valley, though, he said many of the firms branding themselves as technology companies were not set up in this way.

“The CEO wasn't technical, the board of directors had no one technical on it. They had one dude on the management team who was the head of engineering, who was technical, and everyone else wasn't,” he said.

“All right, if that's your team, then you're not a technology company,” he added.

While a firm doesn’t need everyone to be an engineer, Zuckerberg clarified, if a large enough share of that company isn’t an engineer or isn’t technical, then it isn’t truly a technology company.

Zuckerberg isn’t alone 

Other tech leaders appear to share Zuckerberg’s opinion. Speaking to ITPro, Mats Persson, CEO of Umbraco, said that those higher up the company ranks need to have a deep understanding of how the business functions on a technical level.

“I agree with Mark Zuckerberg. Within any company, it’s important to have board members and leadership who understand the core business of the company,” Persson told ITPro.

“So, for a technology company, it is vital to have leaders who have sufficient technical knowledge to adopt and apply technology in a way that rapidly delivers business value, and creates market advantage,” he added.

James Kuht, CEO and Co-Founder at Inversity, also thinks a lack of technical skills at the leadership level can be detrimental to business success.

"CEOs face an unprecedented amount of technical decisions at the moment; not least how to adopt AI in their organizations. To remain competitive, making these decisions quickly is paramount,” Kuht told ITPro.

“Unfortunately, CEOs who lack technical skills can struggle to commit at the speed that beating the competition demands,” he added.