CEO:
In my opinion, the CEO of a company should be the visionary that challenges the organization to push the limits of their product to maintain a competitive edge. In the case of Icon, the CEO is imaginative without being grounded by physics or reality. In this regard, he is more whimsical than visionary. He has bold ideas, but they are everywhere without much continuity across the product line. For instance, the company’s collective mission is to solve the global housing crisis (on planet Earth) through the automation of the construction industry, however 20-30% of the company is dedicated to printing in an off-planet environment. I believe that you need to figure out how to use your product in a terrestrial environment before trying to print in a vacuum.
Another major complaint I have about the CEO is his apparent deprioritization of safety. He openly stated that the product should be "as safe as driving and likely no more" in a response to employees flagging hazards of the current product line. Driving is the most dangerous thing that most Americans do on a daily basis – using that as your safety benchmark is a copout, especially when automation presents an opportunity to increase safety in an industrial application. Another example of his disregard for safety occurred during an F1 event at Icon. The CEO asked the panel engineers when it’s appropriate to sacrifice safety for a competitive edge on the racetrack. To the CEOs dismay, the F1 engineers responded with “never.” You never ever sacrifice safety to move slightly faster. This is the engineer’s ethos and is apparently lost on the CEO.
CTO:
I believe that a CTO should be the most experienced technical leader at the organization. They don’t necessarily have to know everything about everything, but they should have enough horizontal familiarity to be able to develop and influence a product line. Icon’s CTO does not have much experience in technology development and NO experience in organizational leadership. While he should be leading the development of a billion-dollar technology suite, he instead projects his own anxieties by arbitrarily asking for deliverables at an impossible pace. Common feedback from the CTO includes advice to make designs more "elegant" instead of direction. Since when is elegance the measure of efficacy of a product, and how in the world do you design to it?
It’s easy to get wrapped up in accolades such as “Forbes 30 Under 30.” I know I did while I was interviewing and negotiating employment terms. I thought that the CTO was going to be a generational genius judging by his age and position. To my surprise, none of that was true. Icon’s CTO has never worked as an individually contributing engineer in any capacity. He is listed as a co-founder of Icon, I can only speculate that he had the means to help co-found the company and has virtually purchased his job title. Many people have resigned under his “leadership” undoubtedly due to his youth and inexperience.
COO:
I have less of an opinion on the COOs position because I, personally, have never been an operations capacity. I do think that an effective COO must be able to architect, sustainable, high efficiency operations. Icon's COO doesn’t conduct operations that are sustainable nor efficient. Operators pass out due to heat exhaustion and are injured due to fatigue (16 hour shifts are a norm), and something as simple as moving a printer from one slab to a slab next door takes 3 days. More effort needs to be spent on thinking through processes and less time needs to be spent as Icon’s professional cheerleader.
