

Ask HN: What advice would you give a young technical cofounder in a "CTO" role? - nathanh

What have you experienced CTOs or technical managers learned that only comes with years and years of experience?<p>I ask because I keep hearing young technical cofounders call themselves CTOs, and I think about how much we don't know (I'm fairly young too).
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skennedy
Be humble and remember you do not always have the right answer. Listen to
advice from everyone and learn when to take some of it with a grain of salt.
Question every piece of information from every source, including your own gut
feelings. If you can learn to challenge the boss on financials, listen to your
subordinates on their recommendations, and be weary of your own
misconceptions, you will do just fine.

Best of luck!

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sandGorgon
if you are clever with HN search, you will find a thread written almost a year
back where a CTO talked about being sidelined by a VP-Engineering.

The best thing I learned from that was, as a CTO you have to "measure
everything and control the conversation"

EDIT: got that for ya - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=509571>

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hga
In a startup it's essential that every "hat" has a corresponding head it's on.
Being a startup, it's likely that many heads will have many hats; to mix
metaphors just make sure all the bases are covered.

Drilling down, as "CTO" I'd consider myself responsible for making sure of all
the following (needless to say, this isn't an exaustive list):

Business continuity: if you're the only one diligent enough to make sure
you're backups are happening and work, do it (in the bad old days that meant
running the tape backup every day). Never be too proud to sweep the floor.

As CTO, you're responsible for "what": the architecture and consistency of
your systems. Visit the Joel Test and do it in reverse.

Depending on the people below you, you can leave a lot of the "how" to them,
ideally you'll mostly supervise there. Ideally they'll come to consensus on
contentious issues, beware of playing the role of a tiebreaker.

Ah, yes, the people: learn how to recruit well. There's lots of good advice to
be found there (e.g. go to the Ask the Headhunter site and use it in reverse).
For specific advice, I'll note that one of my best bosses would never hire
someone who he had doubts about. In a startup, it's generally the case that a
wrong hire is worse than no hire at all.

Sales, marketing, manufacturing (if that's an issue) and technical coherence.
Make sure everyone is on the same page. That's one of the things that killed
Symbolics, e.g. they spent a lot of money on a factory that couldn't make what
engineering was designing, not that marketing was promoting what engineering
was designing or the reverse.

Make sure there's a product manager for each product, his job is among other
things to help make sure the above is happening.

Good luck!

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Roridge
Stop being worried about having a "title" and do the job and you will pick up
as much experience as you can. If other people want to call you a CTO, let
them, but it's just a name.

Founders who give themselves the important buzz word titles is a false
positive to productivity. Like joining a gym and not working out. You get
instant gratification just from joining.

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lgas
Buckle up. It's going to be a bumpy ride.

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iworkforthem
Mgrs manage... most of the time they dun do technical shit! more importantly
is that u, not other. u being a CTO wat can u do to make things fast with IT.

