A VP of Engineering rarely excels at both managing large teams and cutting-edge technical work. The speaker breaks down the tradeoff: proven managers often lack technical depth, while strong technologists struggle with scaling teams. A founder or senior engineer can fill the gaps.
So for example vp, let's be specific. There's two kinds of things that you want in a vp. One is let's say proven ability to manage and one is a lot of like technical ability. Like so there's manage technical ability, recruiting a bunch, a little bit strategy, strategic thinking, at least being competent, understanding it. I would take a bet that they don't have one of those things like if they had an A plus experience in one. Like they're just like cutting edge technologists and you know that they have a network of people that really respect them so they're probably going to recruit well but they haven't proven they can manage a team of 50 people. They've only managed a team of seven. I might take that bet. Or conversely someone who's managed a team of 100 and isn't a world class technologist but the rest of the team is, including let's say me as the founder, let's say I was a world class technologist.
