
Ask HN: What are the activities of a CTO in a startup? - lucasprim
I&#x27;ve recently been offered a post as CTO in a startup company, and as i talked to the founders i realized they were asking for a CTO but actually looking for a programmer.
That raised a lot of doubt. After all, what is a CTO supposed to be doing in a startup? Programming? Assembling a Team? Managing a team?
How would this change as the startup grows, would it be a leadership position or just a fancy senior programmer title?<p>I really appreciate any help :)
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joshtronic
Titles are pretty meaningless in most startup scenarios. It sounds more like
they are looking for a technical co-founder and are using the C-level title as
a carrot.

If there is not a team already in place, you will most likely be handling the
early programming efforts until a team takes shape.

That's assuming a team ever does take shape. Depending on the vision of the
other founders (and funding / budget), you may end up being the entire team.
The title will look good on your resume but I wouldn't take it all that
literally in regard to your day-to-day responsibilities.

Regarding how it may change over time, it very well could be a vanity title
until another person is installed in the position over you. That's not always
the case, but I've seen it happen. If you are given the opportunity to grow a
team and play an active role in the technical vision of the company (assuming
you're allowed to) you will probably grow with the position.

Source: Former "CTO" at two startups.

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tptacek
The joke goes, "CTO" is the title a founder gets when the engineering team
they hired finally takes away their commit privileges.

It has approximately the same relationship to tech startups as the term
"architect" has to enterprises. Avoid.

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dwwoelfel
This has not been my experience. I've only worked at 2 startups, but in both
cases one of the founders had the CTO title and in both cases the CTO was one
of the best programmers at the company.

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tptacek
I'm sure there are some amazingly talented software architects out there, too.
If it were me, I'd take VP/Eng before I took CTO (but I wouldn't take
VP/anything until there were 20+ employees).

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victortrac
I was recently in your shoes and took the CTO position, leaving behind a very
cushy, well-paying job at an established software company. It's more work than
I was doing at my previous company, and I'm working a lot more hours than
before (much to my wife's chagrin). I spend most of my time writing code
(75%), but I do participate a lot in product discussions, strategy, and
general managing (1-1s, code reviews, architecture discussions, etc). It's
more of a VP Eng position than a CTO since I'm so hands-on, but, for me, the
title itself is not relevant.

The startup raised a big seed round, and will go through a Series A fund-
raising round within the next 6-12 months. My reasons for leaving the
established company were to challenge myself and learn. I'm hoping to start my
own company one day, so for me I'm trading financial well-being and stability
at the established company for a crash-course start-up MBA experience. And in
the event that we take have a favorable exit, than that's all the better (as
much as I believe in the company, I do realize that statistics say otherwise).

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mattwritescode
Depends on two things. What you think of it, and what you make of it. If you
go in there demanding 5% equity talking about what you can bring the team then
think of yourself as a CTO. If you get there write some code employ another
developer then think of yourself as a senior developer.

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kjs3
I have held the CTO title at several start-ups, including VC funded, though
not at a HN style web start-up (YMMV). My job, greatly simplified, mostly
consisted of two things: 1) setting the technical vision for the company, and
2) communicating that vision internally and externally.

As to 1, it's never consisted of a lot of programming (that's what you hire
programmers for), but looking at the hundreds of more or less showstopper
technical decisions that have to be made in a company every week, making a
decisive decision, and being able to justify & live with it. A CTO has to be
experienced, practical and savvy enough to make very hard technical decisions
well enough not to screw the company down the road (you decided to go with a
vendor that folded: Fail, your back-end architecture won't scale: Fail, etc.).
A CTO who jumps on "new and shiny" needs to have a much better explanation
than "new and shiny rocks!".

As to 2, being able to sell the merits of those decisions is vital. Early in
the companies growth, that's making your internal technical folks good with
it, even if they think they would have made a different decision (as they
often would): why add this feature (or not), why this database instead of that
one, why this deployment strategy, why hire that person over another, why
allocate resources here and not there, etc. As the company grows (hopefully),
I spend more and more time making non-technical and external folks believe in
the technical correctness of what we were doing: the sales & marketing team,
client prospects, press/media, potential investors, etc. By this point, I
really should have turned over most any remaining day-to-day stuff over to
operational folks, or I'll become a bottleneck for growth.

That said, a lot of start-ups slap a C-title on all sorts of stuff that they
shouldn't. C-level is a strategic role, not tactical. Your accountant isn't a
CFO, your best programmer isn't (probably) a CTO. The kid who updates the web
site and is reading a book on SEO isn't a CMO. This doesn't matter so much
early on, but if you ever decide to go the VC route, they tend not to like a
C-heavy corporate structure. If nothing else, the VC will want to add
strategic heavy hitters, and people tend to get butthurt when their title goes
from CTO to Senior Programmer or some such.

