6 out of 6 $-Billion Co. Executives Agree: 'Who' Is the Hardest Question

Honest chief executives will admit that in many cases they have no idea what is going on inside their companies.

That, says Netezza chairman Jit Saxena, is why he put down quality of the team as the entrepreneur's first priority on moderator Mike Troiano's survey of "The Billion Dollar Mark," a BostInno State of Innovation panel made up of executives from six billion-dollar companies in the Boston area. Netezza's market cap was $1.3 billion in September, 2010, when IBM acquired the data warehouse firm for $1.7 billion.

"We look for superstars with passion, focus and drive," said Barbara Messing, CMO of TripAdvisor, which at a $14.5 billion market cap was the largest company on the panel by a wide margin.

The others on the panel were:

Next on the list of priorities in Troiano's poll was the size of the market and opportunity--but among the six, there were a few who said the size of the market doesn't matter so much. "Pick something that if you succeed is going to have a really cool impact," said Angle.

When iRobot started, all its founders knew was that many, many people have at some point imagined a future in which robots are part of everyday life. The iRobot founders knew that robots were a futurist's expectation, but they didn't know what those robots would be used for. They didn't know what the market opportunity was. Making that vision real was "what got me up in the morning," he said.

Akamai's Brinklin chimed in: "It’s the romance of the problem more than the application of the solution," he said.

Quality of product was a close second to size of opportunity, with an aggregate score of 17 where the six executives rated each criterion on a 6-to-1 scale, six being least important, one being most. Market/opportunity size scored 16, quality of team scored 11.

For TripAdvisor, as a web-based service, it's paramount, Messing said. At Wayfair, speed sometimes trumps quality. "In e-commerce, we think of ourselves as a fast follower," Conine said.

Here are the rest of the response numbers: