Management turnarounds at IT giants such as Google and Apple this year have turned the investment spotlight on who should best run a company: the entrepreneur who founded it; or a professional executive.
In the past, fund managers and other key investors believed that, while entrepreneurs might be good at filling a gap in the market, a professional executive should be brought in to maximise productivity and profits. It was this logic that was behind the boardroom coup in 1984 that ousted Steve Jobs as the chief executive of Apple, the company he had founded. And it was this logic that also led to the appointment of Eric Schmidt as the chief executive of the search giant Google over its co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Already this year, Mr Schmidt has relinquished his role at Google to Mr Page, and Mr Jobs has taken a leave of absence because of ill health, ceding the day-to-day running of Apple to Tim Cook, its chief operating officer.
Impressed by the achievements of Mr Jobs, Mr Page and Mr Brin and the success of newer entrepreneurs such as Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook co-founder and chief executive, investors are now reassessing the true management role of IT company founders.
"The conventional wisdom says a start-up chief executive should make way for a professional chief executive once the company has achieved product-market fit," says Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of the Andreessen Horowitz venture capital fund "… We prefer to fund companies whose founder will run the company as its [chief executive]."
The Andreessen Horowitz fund is managed by Mr Horowitz and its co-founder Marc Andreessen, an entrepreneur who also founded the 1990s web browser developer Netscape, acquired for US$4.2 billion (Dh15.42bn) by AOL in 1999.
Mr Andreessen's background, therefore, gives the Andreessen Horowitz fund unique insight into the role of company founders in managing a start-up once it has evolved into a robust international corporation.
"The technology business is fundamentally the innovation business," says Mr Horowitz. "Etymologically, the word technology means 'a better way of doing things'. As a result, innovation is the core competency for technology companies
"Technology companies are born because they create a better way of doing things. Eventually, someone else will come up with a better way. Therefore, if a technology company ceases to innovate, it will die," he says.
This increasingly popular view of entrepreneur chief executives as the champions of the technology sector is also supported by academic evidence.
In the US, the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business conducted a study of about 50 companies and reported that founding chief executives consistently beat the professional chief executives on a broad range of measures including the amount of funding raised, and returns on investments.
This a view supported by Mr Horowitz. "As we looked at the history of great technology companies, we discovered that founders ran an overwhelming majority of them for a very long time."
The Andreessen Horowitz fund names about 25 well-known IT companies that have benefited from having a founder as chief executive. These include Michael Dell, the Dell chief executive and founder; Larry Ellison, the Oracle founder and chief executive; Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and former chief executive; and the late Al Shugart, the co-founder and chief executive of the disk-drive giant Seagate.
A new generation of entrepreneurs, such as Mr Zuckerberg, and Evan Williams, the Twitter chief executive, is also convincing investment fund managers that company founders make the best company chiefs.
Mr Page's new role as the chief executive of Google follows a number of controversial statements by the outgoing Mr Schmidt. When Mr Brin and Mr Page were building Google, they created the company credo: "Don't be evil".
Mr Schmidt took this credo one step further when he dismissed consumers' privacy concerns. "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place," he said.
But the underlying reason Mr Page has ousted Mr Schmidt is the management disagreements between Mr Schmidt and Google's co-founders. For six years, Mr Schmidt blocked Mr Page and Mr Brin's plan for Google to launch its own web browser before finally agreeing to endorse what would become the highly successful Chrome product.
The shift in leadership at Google can be seen as evidence of a sea change taking place in IT attitudes towards entrepreneurs being allowed to continue the companies they founded.
The announcement this year that Mr Jobs' ill health had forced him to take a leave of absence from Apple has also highlighted the crucial role a gifted entrepreneur can play in a company's growth.
When Mr Jobs regained control of Apple in 1996, he immediately reversed all the decisions made by Gil Amelio, the professional chief executive who preceded him, and then proceeded to turn Apple into a household name.
The theory that company founders make the best chief executives is also gaining credence outside IT. One such is Warren Buffett, a renowned investor and one of the world's richest men, who is still the primary shareholder, chairman and chief executive of his conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway.
According to Mr Horowitz, key reasons founders make better chief executives than professional chief executives appointed by the board include the fact that they have their sights set beyond the quarterly figures.
"Professional CEOs … tend to be driven by relatively shorter-term goals," says Mr Horowitz. "They are paid in terms of stock options that vest over four years, and cash bonuses for quarterly and yearly performance."
With innovation becoming increasingly important across all industries, the business world seems set to adopt Silicon Valley's new approach to chief executives. In future, companies are increasingly likely be assessed on the basis of their chief executive's entrepreneurial background.
