Engineer-turned-CEO here.<p>Engineering teaches you a lot of the analytical / architecture skills you need to build and run organizations, but you won't be ready to lead until you learn a decent amount of the other business functions that make up just about every company.<p>You need to learn how marketing works, but not just the basics - learn what type of people are good at each role, what are the types of roles you need for different types of marketing strategies, some of the tactics for each strategy, etc...<p>Rinse and repeat for sales, operations, finance, product (different from, but aligned with engineering), and general strategic stuff like legal, recruiting, release strategy, fund raising, investor management, and so on.<p>Here's the good news: you don't need to be an expert in all of these areas when you get started. You just need to know enough to know which questions to ask and then surround yourself with advisors who can help answer them.<p>If you've ever built a new product (doesn't literally need to be a commercial product) from scratch and actually gotten people to use it, then you're probably already capable of thinking strategically - that's the first core ingredient for dealing with the market / product / economic challenges tasked to CEOs.<p>The second ingredient is the empathy and people-management part... This means being able to internalize concepts like e every employee is different, values different things, and therefore might need / expect different things from you - some employees might deeply care about working on interesting projects; others might care about being able to work in a specific time / location so they can maximize the time they spend with their family; some might care about money; but in my experience overwhelmingly most employees just care about feeling like their work is meaningful and appreciated.<p>Learning how to build an organization out of people who all have different personal priorities, levels of experience, backgrounds, and personalities is not trivial. You basically need to develop a high degree of self-awareness about your own needs and values as an employee first. And once you're able to do that, it gets a lot easier to recognize and understand what others need.<p>TL;DR; - there's a big menagerie of different things you have to learn to be a CEO, and engineering can help you structure the process of learning them but it's not enough unto itself. Develop a strong sense of self-awareness, a good advisory board, and the humility to ask for help when you need it.