Who Runs Silicon Valley

In our fourth annual review of leadership in the Silicon Valley, the fundamental shift in the landscape of the Silicon Valley 150 (SV150) is the rapid disappearance of many established public companies, with so few new Silicon Valley IPOs taking their place. Why have so many boards of directors and CEOs opted to sell in 2016-17? And what is happening to tech leadership in the face of all this M&A activity?

In this C-Suite edition of our annual SV150 report, we dip into the ranks of the senior functional executives running the top public technology companies in the Silicon Valley, to better understand the people in these important roles. One thing is clear: Chief Executive Officers have more direct reports than ever and SV150 functional specialists now outnumber the generalist heads of business units by more than 3 to 1.

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We learned a lot about how the SV150 thinks about lead­er­ship from build­ing the dataset for this report. From our research, we cal­cu­late there is an aver­age of 11.5 lead­ers per SV150 com­pa­ny. While all com­pa­nies had CEOs and CFOs in place, there was con­sid­er­able vari­a­tion in what oth­er senior roles were des­ig­nat­ed. For exam­ple, we found Chief Oper­at­ing Offi­cers at only 34% of SV150 com­pa­nies, and they were most like­ly to be found at the largest pub­lic com­pa­nies (42% worked at a Top 50 ranked com­pa­ny). Like­wise, Gen­er­al Managers/​Presidents of busi­ness units were most like­ly to be found at Top 50 ranked com­pa­nies (55% of them worked at a Top 50 ranked company).

Our research focus­es on the func­tion­al man­agers in the lead­er­ship team. The aver­age num­ber of func­tion­al man­agers report­ing direct­ly to the CEO has more than dou­bled since the 1980s, and three-quar­ters of the increase has been attrib­uted to func­tion­al man­agers. Our report pro­files the func­tion­al man­agers of the SV150 run­ning finance, engi­neer­ing, sales, mar­ket­ing and HR — all roles of increas­ing impor­tance in the man­age­ment team, and with ever-evolv­ing responsibilities.