Mark Zuckerberg says leaders should have technical skills if they want to call themselves a tech company

• Mark Zuckerberg thinks some self-proclaimed tech firms are lacking technical leadership.
• He said board members and management should have technical skills if they want to be known as a “tech” company.
• The Meta CEO said he’s been “pretty careful” about finding the right balance in Meta’s management.

What makes a tech company a tech company?

According to Mark Zuckerberg, the answer is the technical skills of the people in charge.

The Meta CEO shared his thoughts on tech leadership during a live episode of the “Acquired” podcast that was released Wednesday.

Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook at 19 from his dorm room at Harvard, said a lack of technical chops in leadership was one of the first things he noticed when he went to Silicon Valley.

“The CEO wasn’t technical, the board of directors had no one technical on it, they had like one dude on the management team who was the head of engineering who was technical and everyone else wasn’t,” he said. “It’s like, alright, if that’s your team then you’re not a technology company.”

Zuckerberg explained how he’s tried to do it differently at Meta.

“I think one of the things that I’ve always been pretty careful about is I actually want a lot of the people on our management team, it’s split, it’s mostly people running these big product groups who come up through different technical pathways at the company and I think there’s a balance,” he said.

Meta chief technology officer Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, for example, created Facebook’s News Feed and leads the company’s Reality Labs division, responsible for its AR, VR, and metaverse projects, and has been with the company since 2006. Chief product officer Chris Cox came to Meta in 2005 as a software engineer and built early versions of News Feed, among other features.

Zuckerberg clarified that doesn’t mean technical skills are the only kind that matters in leadership.

“You don’t want everyone to be an engineer because there’s other things that matter too, but if you don’t have enough of your kind of share of the company as engineers, then you’re not a technology company,” he said. “And I think that that also is important to the board in terms of how you weigh decisions and culturally things inside the company matters a lot.”

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Elsewhere in the podcast, Zuckerberg talked about his “20-year mistake” of taking responsibility and apologizing for issues he says Meta didn’t cause.

He also talked about Meta and Apple’s long-running rivalry and said he expects the iPhone maker to be Meta’s biggest competitor in the next decade.