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Cha-cha-cha changes

You have probably held several jobs over the course of your career. Most likely, you've changed managers or teams or companies. You may have gotten promoted into new job titles and responsibilities. Or perhaps you've made more dramatic shifts and changed up your professional identity entirely.

Broadly speaking, ambitious people building successful careers fall into two categories:

• Incremental growers: Spend years becoming world-class at their jobs, building domain expertise brick by brick. They start off at the bottom, execute consistently, and rise through the ranks to senior levels. If they switch companies, it is usually to a similar role in a similar organization.
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• Career changers: May build skills incrementally for a time, but their career path includes major shifts in professional identity. They change disciplines more than once. They move between academia and industry and government, between huge companies and 10-person startups, between tech and healthcare.

Over the long run, do career changes or incremental growers build stronger businesses and/or careers? Over the next four weeks, we're going dive into the data.

First up this week: Are the highest-performing AI companies led by incremental growers or career changers?

Some caveats

Cards on the table: I have been a career changer. I started out in academia researching and teaching. I spent many years in R&D at Microsoft, incrementally growing as a product manager. I've been the founder and CEO of venture-backed company. I've been a solopreneur.​

As Textio's CEO, many of my best hires were career changers. Our first customer success leader began as a software engineer with a PhD in electrical engineering. One of the best backend engineers I've ever worked with started her career as a people analytics specialist. My cofounder, who was Textio's initial CTO and current CEO, was a college music major. The list goes on.

At the same time, most of our great people had more traditional career paths. The VP who began as an accountant and worked her way into a controller position. The outstanding salesperson who had worked in SaaS enterprise sales his entire career. So many software engineers.

I came to believe that, when organizations need to both innovate and scale at the same time, you need both kinds of people. The career changers drive ongoing innovation, and the incremental growers scale it.

Let's see whether this is reflected in AI leadership teams.

Our first data set: The AI 50

Forbes keeps an up-to-date list of the market's hottest AI companies. These are companies with real traction that are rapidly eating into the market reputations of legacy players. For this week's data set, I took a look at the leadership teams of these companies. Are the highest-performing AI companies led by incremental growers or career changers?

76% of AI CEOs are career changers

In many but not all cases, the CEOs of the AI 50 are also founders of their companies. Entrepreneurs are a non-linear bunch, and 76% of the AI CEOs made at least one major career shift prior to leading their current companies.

Some of the CEO career shifts are easy to understand. For instance, several AI CEOs lived former lives as academic researchers before entering the for-profit world. But there are other patterns too. For instance, nearly half the group had experience working in multiple disciplines before starting their current companies.

The majority of AI C-suites are career changers too

I also looked at the backgrounds of C-suite execs apart from the founders and/or CEO. Conventional wisdom is that innovative founder-CEOs hire experienced execs to scale once the company has initial traction. Once the company has gone from 0 to 1, CEOs traditionally bet on incremental growers: execs with linear, career-long experience lead disciplines like HR, legal, and finance.

But that's not what's happening with these companies. AI C-suites are dominated by career changers.

64% of C-suite execs at the hottest AI companies have major career shifts in their pasts. For instance, it is common to see:

• HR leaders who spent years in product or engineering
• Ops leaders who are former founders
• Tech leaders who are former academics

These leaders average at least four years of experience working in some industry or function that is significantly different from the role they hold today.

Incremental growers are better represented in C-suite roles than in CEO roles, suggesting that CEOs are still looking for domain expertise to help scale. But in these innovative companies, leaders hire career changers more than you might expect. Domain expertise matters, but lateral thinking and varied career experience matters more.

Next week: We're diving into the leadership teams of legacy enterprises to see how they differ from the hot AI companies. Subscribe here.​

Kieran

Whether you're growing steadily or changing careers, I can help you grow. My coaching clients include startup CEOs, C-suite execs, and ambitious leaders inside large organizations, all leading with founder-level clarity, urgency, and ownership. Ask me about becoming a client!​

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kieran@nerdprocessor.com
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