Connect your Claude, Codex or OpenClaw for full transcripts on millions of podcasts. Two week free trial, cancel anytime.

Start free trial →
BT Ben Thompson Ben Thompson Writes Stratechery, a subscription newsletter analyzing the business strategy behind tech and media companies, and has built a reputation for framing how platfo...

“Succession planning isn't just, it's not identifying who's the next Steve Jobs. What it is, is professionalizing the organization so it is an entity in its own right. It's not an exoskeleton that depends on the guy in the middle.”

Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026

“Succession planning isn't just, it's not identifying who's the next Steve Jobs. What it is, is professionalizing the organization so it is an entity in its own right. It's not an exoskeleton that depends on the guy in the middle.” — Ben Thompson, Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson

Context

Thompson compares Nvidia to early Apple, where everything flowed up to one person. Apple became more resilient because Steve Jobs's illness forced it to prepare; he doesn't think Nvidia ever went through that.

Listen to the episode → More from Ben Thompson → More Tech Strategy & Big Tech quotes →

Transcript

Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson Around 24:40 into the episode
Ben Thompson

sort of company, you don't hire generalists. And Apple would tell you this. We don't hire, like, I remember what it was, Apple University. Like, there's one of their precepts. We don't hire generalists. We hire experts, specialists in their field. The only generalist is the CEO.

Andrew Sharp

Yeah.

Ben Thompson

And in retrospect, I was just talking with John Dithering about this. We brought up the Apple comparison. One of the most fortunate things, it's hard to say fortune when someone died. Right. One of the most fortunate things that happened to Apple is Steve Jobs' death was not sudden. He had to take a sabbatical for like six months or something because of his cancer. And Tim Cook took over. And then Jobs came back for like two, two and a half years before he died. And I think I suspect that was a real wake-up call for Apple in terms of succession planning. Like, and succession planning isn't just, it's not identifying who's the next Steve Jobs. What it is, is professionalizing the organization so it is an entity in its own right. It's not an exoskeleton that depends on the guy in the middle.

Andrew Sharp

Sure.

Ben Thompson

And so Apple, I think in that time period, 2008, 2011, became a much more professionalized organization, more structure, more resilient, in the anticipation, we're not going to have the

Andrew Sharp

master of public that

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson

“If NVIDIA never got to be a bullet train, they just built the fastest freaking car on the planet. Which meant no good governance, no succession plan, none of this. But that's also why they were such a dynamic company.” — Ben Thompson, Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson “Jensen Huang was out there backstopping companies, supporting companies, like being the bank for the bubble. … Is a future CEO going to do that? … The likelihood that we're going to just have a money crunch, like the railroad issue, the rails were useful, it's significantly increased, I would say.” — Ben Thompson, Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson