Comment by rvz
2 years ago
> I’m not sure Hassabis’s time would be well spent thinking about, I dunno, how to allocate headcount to the Google Cloud Enterprise Sales team.
Exactly. There is a CEO of Google Cloud (Thomas Kurian) that should be doing that. That's called "delegation".
Ok, so then evaluating whether Thomas Kurian is doing a good job, discussing and pressure testing the rationale behind his proposed targets and strategies, figuring out how they fit in with the broader company strategy and communicating this vision effectively, having a contingency plan if Thomas Kurian leaves or a better candidate for Cloud CEO appears on the radar. These are just off the top of my head.
You seem to believe “Delegation” is a passive act; the reality is Hassabis would end up spending, generously, about 1/10 of the time he is now thinking about things like how to monetize LLM’s.
No CEO is going to be strong in all areas, and it seems different but incredibly successful CEOs can come from a variety of backgrounds and management styles.
>"Ok, so then evaluating whether Thomas Kurian is doing a good job, discussing and pressure testing the rationale behind his proposed targets and strategies, figuring out how they fit in with the broader company strategy and communicating this vision effectively, having a contingency plan if Thomas Kurian leaves or a better candidate for Cloud CEO appears on the radar."
You could say the same thing about CEOs who are good at that sort of thing as well: Does Sunadr or Satya understand the technical decisions of going all in on Spanner opposed to NoSql type systems or backing the Go language over Carbon, these are all things that will have huge second order effects 10+ years down the road.