No. Salespeople make great CEOs, too. There’s no firm rule here.
Marc Benioff, though a programmer in his youth, ran a big chunk of sales at Oracle before founding Salesforce.
What they do make is expensive CEOs, usually, at least in the early days.
Salesperson CEOs need a lot more resources, and tend to want a lot more resources, than Engineer CEOs do in the early days. They can’t code. And they are used to having teams under them do a lot of the work — so they want bigger teams (i.e., more burn) earlier. And they often are a bit more seasoned, so they have higher personal burn rates, too.
I don’t have the numbers to back it up, but Salesperson CEOs seem to have a burn rate about 1.5–2x higher than Hacker/Engineer CEOs in the early days.
If you can grow 1.5x-2x faster though, it’s likely worth it.
