"The truth is that it's a lot easier to fake having the potential to be a CEO than it is to fake having the potential to be a CTO."
That's easy to say when you're a developer and understand what makes a good CTO. There are probably a lot of business guys who don't know how to evaluate tech guys any more than tech guys know how to evaluate business guys. It's probably not that hard to bullshit a business guy if you can talk convincingly about scalability, node.js, Clojure, Big Data, "cloud", etc. A lot of solo business guys looking for technical co-founders will end up with sub-optimal technical co-founders because they don't know how to filter them out.
However, you're also right about the difficulties of identifying potential CEOs. Part of the problem is that, due to the hierarchical nature of firms, there's simply a massive shortage of people with CEO experience - most firms employ just one CEO at a time. This means that if you're looking for a CEO, you're probably going to have to take a chance on someone who hasn't done it before, and there's a much bigger experience gap between "business guy with MBA" and "good CEO" than there is between "senior developer" and "technical co-founder". This shortage is (partly) why experienced CEOs get paid so much, and why the jump in compensation from "business guy with MBA" to "CEO" is much bigger than the jump from "senior developer" to "CTO".
This is also a problem for aspiring CEOs, because they can't prove themselves until they get a chance, and chances at CEO level are very rare. The good potential CEOs can't easily differentiate themselves from the bad ones, and this also creates a perverse situation in which simply faking CEO potential doesn't have many disadvantages compared to actually being good. Once you've been hired anywhere as a CEO, so long as you don't calamitously screw up, you're on the right side of the CEO scarcity problem.
That's easy to say when you're a developer and understand what makes a good CTO. There are probably a lot of business guys who don't know how to evaluate tech guys any more than tech guys know how to evaluate business guys. It's probably not that hard to bullshit a business guy if you can talk convincingly about scalability, node.js, Clojure, Big Data, "cloud", etc. A lot of solo business guys looking for technical co-founders will end up with sub-optimal technical co-founders because they don't know how to filter them out.
However, you're also right about the difficulties of identifying potential CEOs. Part of the problem is that, due to the hierarchical nature of firms, there's simply a massive shortage of people with CEO experience - most firms employ just one CEO at a time. This means that if you're looking for a CEO, you're probably going to have to take a chance on someone who hasn't done it before, and there's a much bigger experience gap between "business guy with MBA" and "good CEO" than there is between "senior developer" and "technical co-founder". This shortage is (partly) why experienced CEOs get paid so much, and why the jump in compensation from "business guy with MBA" to "CEO" is much bigger than the jump from "senior developer" to "CTO".
This is also a problem for aspiring CEOs, because they can't prove themselves until they get a chance, and chances at CEO level are very rare. The good potential CEOs can't easily differentiate themselves from the bad ones, and this also creates a perverse situation in which simply faking CEO potential doesn't have many disadvantages compared to actually being good. Once you've been hired anywhere as a CEO, so long as you don't calamitously screw up, you're on the right side of the CEO scarcity problem.