Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg defines what skill makes a ‘Tech Company’: “I think one of the things…” – Times of India

Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder of Facebook, believes that a company can only truly be considered a “tech company” if its leadership possesses technical expertise. The Meta CEO emphasised the importance of technical skills among those at the helm, suggesting this quality is a fundamental requirement for any company operating in the tech industry.
Speaking on tech leadership in the Silicon Valley during a live episode of the “Acquired” podcast, Zuckerberg said a lack of technical skills in leadership was one of the first things he noticed in his early days, as per Business Insider.
“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.
“It’s like, alright, if that’s your team then you’re not a technology company,” he added.

Zuckerberg on what’s different at Meta

According to Zuckerberg, he’s been “pretty careful” about finding the right balance in Meta’s management.
“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.
Meta’s chief technology officer, Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, created Facebook’s News Feed and also spearheads the company’s Reality Labs division that is responsible for all things AR, VR and metaverse. Similarly, chief product officer Chris Cox, who joined in 2005 as a software engineer, played a key role in developing early iterations of News Feed and other features on the platform.

Technical skills are NOT the only thing that matters, says Zuckerberg

The Meta CEO, however, said that having technical skills is not the only quality that the company leadership must have.
“You don’t want everyone to be an engineer because there’s other things that matter too, but if you don’t have enough of your kind of share of the company as engineers, then you’re not a technology company,” he said.
“And I think that that also is important to the board in terms of how you weigh decisions and culturally things inside the company matters a lot,” he added.