Without getting bogged down with literals, I'd do my best to determine what constitutes a good rocket scientist, and work away. I suppose I'm just confident I could do it. I've had to hire good people in my field (pharmacy), but I have no formal connection to the industry. Sure, maybe if I was a rocket scientist, I'd have a slight edge in this specific case. But don't forget, being a CEO doesn't mean you're hiring all rocket scientists (or in FB's case, engineers). You have to hire people of all types, so you lose any competitive advantage rather quickly.
>CEO doesn't mean you're hiring all rocket scientists (or in FB's case, engineers). You have to hire people of all types, so you lose any competitive advantage rather quickly.
eh, but depending on the company, some roles are more important than others. I mean, in facebook's case, it'd be marketing. Facebook, really, doesn't need top of the world Engineers; paying 5x what they would otherwise on infrastructure won't kill them. (they do need good people for the places where Engineering and Marketing colide. They need people that are good at psychology and at least mediocre programmers.) But marketing is what they /do/ - their business plan and their P/E is predicated on capturing a huge percentage of the world's advertising dollars. without best in the world marketing types, they are sunk.
This is why having even a relitively small edge in hiring the best people in one particular area can make such a huge difference, and one of the major reasons why I think CEO experience is not particularly portable across fields.
Without getting bogged down with literals, I'd do my best to determine what constitutes a good rocket scientist, and work away. I suppose I'm just confident I could do it. I've had to hire good people in my field (pharmacy), but I have no formal connection to the industry. Sure, maybe if I was a rocket scientist, I'd have a slight edge in this specific case. But don't forget, being a CEO doesn't mean you're hiring all rocket scientists (or in FB's case, engineers). You have to hire people of all types, so you lose any competitive advantage rather quickly.