Web 2.0 News Desk
America's First CTO Should Come from Within the IT Industry
Biotech and energy industries are all hugely important, but IT has become part of our culture
Nov. 10, 2008 06:00 AM
Coach Wei's Blog
The notion of having a CTO for the USA is very exciting. It’s a job that I’d really want to have - I’m working on my resume right now!!! More important than the question of who will be the CTO is which industry this person should be coming from. I’d really really recommend the following three industries...

- Information technology industry
- Information technology industry
- Information technology industry
Not because I’m from the IT industry, but rather because IT is the industry that the title of CTO is born from and IT is the industry that is leading society in terms of not only technical advances, but rather more importantly, culture evolutions.
The biotech and energy industries are all hugely important, and may produce far more important technological breakthroughs than the IT industry would be able to, but IT has become part of our culture (as proven in my blog entry The Common Culture Root of Web 2.0 and Barack Obama).
Part of the reason for Obama’s win is due to his campaign's usage of IT in building out grassroots support and reaching out to millions of people. The web and the Internet, did wonders in politics!
Who would I nominate? The 2nd best candidates are:
- Mitt Romney (what? Did I actually type this out?)
- Charles Vest (former MIT President. Disqualified because of lacking IT industry background, but a University president may not be a bad idea. Did I effectively nominate Larry Summers here?)
- Marc Andreessen
- VCs like Vinod Khosla (pictured) are good choices. As a category, VCs are good pools to look into.
About Coach WeiCoach Wei is founder and CEO of Yottaa, a web performance optimization company. He is also founder
and Chairman of Nexaweb, an enterprise application modernization software company. Coding, running,
magic, robot, big data, speed...are among his favorite list of things (not necessarily in that order. His
coding capability is really at PowerPoint level right now). Caffeine, doing something entrepreneurial and
getting out of sleeping are three reasons that he gets up in the morning and gets really excited.