Why are so many successful founding CEOs software engineers?
All of the people on this list are "software engineers" in the sense that they have some rudimentary education in the field. Almost none of them could <i>get a job</i> as a software engineer at their own company, if they had to, because they would be completely unqualified. And I'm not looking down my nose at anyone: I have an undergraduate degree in CS, but I got it 16 years ago and then went to law school, and there is not a serious place on earth that would let me touch their codebase. But if I started a really valuable company tomorrow (maybe I should), I would code as a software engineer on this list.<p>I mean, come at it from the other direction: Why are there so many software engineers who are not successful CEOs? My God, they have the secrets of for loops, S-expressions, they know about vim---and yet they aren't running Pfizer? Why not?