<story><title>Letter to Sundar Pichai from TCI Fund Management [pdf]</title><url>https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/20th%20January%202023.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MR4D</author><text>&amp;gt; when the company is taken over by MBAs and activist investors&lt;p&gt;I really get tired of this sentiment because it’s become a lazy stereotype.&lt;p&gt;Activist investors come around because of bad management.  Bad management is irrespective of the MBA.&lt;p&gt;Satya Nadella of Microsoft is a much better CEO than Sundar Pichai, and both happen to have an MBA.&lt;p&gt;For reference, over the last 5 years, Microsoft stock has grown over 150% (not counting dividends) while Google has grown about 70%.&lt;p&gt;Chuck Robbins, CEO of Cisco, has a degree in Math with a concentration in CS, but no MBA and has only grown the stock by about 12% before dividends.&lt;p&gt;Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, studied CS at Harvard, but Never graduated.  He has lost about 25% for investors over the past 5 years.&lt;p&gt;I choose stock returns because they are what fund most people’s retirement accounts (usually via a mutual fund owning them). The companies are all significant tech companies of roughly $200 billion or greater.</text></item><item><author>paxys</author><text>Keep an eye on the smaller tech companies that are snapping up all the laid off talent right now. They will be the next Google&amp;#x2F;Facebook&amp;#x2F;Microsoft&amp;#x2F;Amazon, while all of those will eventually shift to the IBM&amp;#x2F;Cisco&amp;#x2F;Oracle tier over the next decade. That&amp;#x27;s exactly what happens when the company is taken over by MBAs and activist investors while engineering is just a replaceable resource.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>015a</author><text>&amp;gt; Bad management is irrespective of the MBA.&lt;p&gt;It sure is, but just as &amp;quot;googling something&amp;quot; means searching it, the zeitgeist doesn&amp;#x27;t care. I think this should severely worry MBA programs, and those with the degree.&lt;p&gt;People quote the successful leaders who hold MBAs, while simultaneously ignoring the many who don&amp;#x27;t, or the many who have it but have failed. It&amp;#x27;s almost like it doesn&amp;#x27;t matter; because it genuinely isn&amp;#x27;t correlative beyond &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m interested in business, let&amp;#x27;s get an MBA&amp;quot; (meaning, there is a pipeline bias in the statistics, but that doesn&amp;#x27;t independently validate the incremental impact of the degree).</text></comment>
<story><title>Letter to Sundar Pichai from TCI Fund Management [pdf]</title><url>https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/20th%20January%202023.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MR4D</author><text>&amp;gt; when the company is taken over by MBAs and activist investors&lt;p&gt;I really get tired of this sentiment because it’s become a lazy stereotype.&lt;p&gt;Activist investors come around because of bad management.  Bad management is irrespective of the MBA.&lt;p&gt;Satya Nadella of Microsoft is a much better CEO than Sundar Pichai, and both happen to have an MBA.&lt;p&gt;For reference, over the last 5 years, Microsoft stock has grown over 150% (not counting dividends) while Google has grown about 70%.&lt;p&gt;Chuck Robbins, CEO of Cisco, has a degree in Math with a concentration in CS, but no MBA and has only grown the stock by about 12% before dividends.&lt;p&gt;Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, studied CS at Harvard, but Never graduated.  He has lost about 25% for investors over the past 5 years.&lt;p&gt;I choose stock returns because they are what fund most people’s retirement accounts (usually via a mutual fund owning them). The companies are all significant tech companies of roughly $200 billion or greater.</text></item><item><author>paxys</author><text>Keep an eye on the smaller tech companies that are snapping up all the laid off talent right now. They will be the next Google&amp;#x2F;Facebook&amp;#x2F;Microsoft&amp;#x2F;Amazon, while all of those will eventually shift to the IBM&amp;#x2F;Cisco&amp;#x2F;Oracle tier over the next decade. That&amp;#x27;s exactly what happens when the company is taken over by MBAs and activist investors while engineering is just a replaceable resource.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ROTMetro</author><text>How much growth has Facebook stock had from the first day Zuck was in charge until now? I mean you need to take people&amp;#x27;s entire tenure not random periods of your choosing.</text></comment>