This article is more than 10 years old.
Who gets to be a tech industry CEO?
The executive search firm Russell Reynolds Associates considered that question recently, producing some fascinating stats on 135 of the men and women (well, mostly men, really) who run some of the country's most important tech companies.
What they found is mostly predictable, but nonetheless still fascinating. Most CEOs are men. They are largely educated at Ivy League and comparable schools. (Hello, Stanford!) Most have academic backgrounds in business, computer science or engineering. Many of them are running companies they founded; a large number have been CEOs once before.
And yes, lots of them are named Dave.
Here's a look at some of the specifics of the study's findings:
-
95.5% of the 135 CEO’s are male; ergo, just 4.4% - 6 of 135 - are female. That is consistent with the Fortune 500, where 3.4% of CEOs are female.
- Over 13% of the group were undergrads at either Harvard or Stanford. Next most common colleges: UC Berkeley (5.2%); Penn (Hurrah for the red and the blue, just sayin', 3.7%); Princeton and the University of Colorado, 3% each.
- 20% of the CEOs went to Ivy League schools. All eight of the Ancient Eight are represented, led by Harvard with 9, Penn with 5 and Princeton with 4.
- Most popular undergraduate majors: Economics, 22%; Computer Science, 20%; Engineering, 17%.
- More than half spent at least some time in graduate school.
- 27% have MBAs; 14.8% have MBAs from either Stanford or Harvard.
- This is fascinating. 23.5% of the CEOs previously worked at one of five key tech companies. Amazingly, topping the list is Yahoo, at 8.9%; then Google, 5.1%; Microsoft, 3.7%; Facebook and eBay, 2.9% each.
- Again: close to 1 in 10 leading tech CEOs once worked at Yahoo.
- 69% of the current CEOs founded the company themselves.
- 21.4% of the current CEOs were hired externally.
- 9.6% of the current CEOs were promoted internally.
- Of those hired externally: 55% were CEOs elsewhere; 34% were senior VPs someplace else.
- Of the 29 CEOs hired externally, 41.3% had worked previously for one or more of these companies: Google, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, Disney, Facebook. Yahoo topped that list, too.
- Of those promoted internally: 46.2% were senior VPs; 23% were COOs; 15.4% were CFOs; 7.7% were CTOs and 7.7% were consultants.
- The average tenure of the CEOs on the lists is 4.24 years.
- 4.4% of the CEOs on the list are named Dave. Also popular: Michael; Jon/John; Alex; Jeff/Geoff.
