It’s rare to get insights into what the world’s top CEOs are like in their work meetings, but it’s even rarer when someone is able to compare three top tech CEOs by virtue of having worked with them.
Kevin Weil, who’s the current Chief Product Officer at OpenAI, has had a pretty chequered careers in tech. He worked at Twitter from 2009 to 2016, and was the SVP of Product. From 2016 to 2021, he was the VP of product of Instagram and Facebook. And in June 2024, he’d joined OpenAI as its Chief Product officer. And these positions give him a unique vantage point to observe the biggest leaders in tech.
”You’ve worked for Jack Dorsey at Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg at Meta, and now Sam Altman at OpenAI. Who runs the best meeting?” he was asked in an interview.
“Mark Zuckerberg is more structured than Sam Altman and Jack Dorsey,” Weil replied. “Mark will always come in with a hypothesis, which he’s always thought deeply about, whatever it is. Mark’s super ambitious, but always has sort of a path from here to there charted in his mind. And one of the things I loved working with him is he’s also always open to feedback. You can say, I think you’re wrong, and here’s why. But you’d better be ready for the debate that’s coming on the other end of it, because he has a reason why he thinks what he does. And you can convince him that you’re right and he’s wrong, but it takes you having a really well developed opinion yourself,” he said.
“Sam is more of a visionary,” Weil continued. “Humans in general are bad at exponentials — we’re not good at actually extrapolating out the amount of change that comes from being on an exponential curve. Sam is the best person I’ve ever seen at actually doing that and saying, okay, if this is really exponential, then in three years, it’s not going to be this linear trend that is kind of what we as humans always do. It’s actually going to be here and that’s why we’re going to, you know, build a company that spends 500 billion building AI infrastructure. It’s because Sam is better at writing exponentials than the rest of us, and sees these kinds of outcomes, and is actually doing what we need to do to be ready for it,” he explained.