
The CTO Journey at a Small Startup - vinnyglennon
https://zapier.com/engineering/startup-cto/
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dpeck
C suite member still doing coding 80% of the time is extremely unlikely in my
experience. You may still be able to steal away some time on nights and
weekends to be able to stay sharp but day to day you're much more concerned
with worrying about the future of the business, interacting with customers,
and often acting as a service provider to other parts of the management team
(vetting out partnerships/acquisitions etc) from a technology perspective the
same way in house counsel and CFOs do for legal and financial matters.

What this seems to be calling CTO is more akin to a most senior
engineer/fellow/hacker. I've seen it called Chief Engineer before. That's the
person the the CTO should be able to hold their own in a conversation with but
being that person would seem be unlikely for an exec team member as the
business grows.

*Titles are more to less meaningless unless there is internal conflict or you're interacting with someone external, ignore that bit and think in terms of roles

~~~
JimDabell
> C suite member still doing coding 80% of the time is extremely unlikely in
> my experience.

That depends on what you mean by "small startup". In a VC-backed Silicon
Valley startup where you're hiring fast and aiming for massive growth in as
short a time as possible? You're probably right. Small startup that's self-
funded or close to it with a tiny team, like what happens in most of the rest
of the world? Yeah, you're probably rolling up your sleeves and getting your
hands dirty for quite a while to come, because the code that you're selling
has to come from _somewhere_.

Different startups have different constraints. It sounds like you're used to
the SV-style startup where the constraint is time, rather than money. A lot of
businesses have their most senior technical staff write code because they
don't have the cash to hire more developers but their product still needs to
be built.

~~~
afpx
I think the confusion is semantics. Most people think of a startup as a growth
business. A startup is different from a small business. Whereas a small
business may aim for $10M in revenue per year in 5 years (and maintain that),
a startup may aim for $1B in revenue per year in 5 years.

So, if you're the CTO in your second year of business and still writing most
of the code, you're probably a small business.

That said, in my experience, if you're a CTO and not able to at least
understand the source code, you're a liability. I've worked for CTOs like
that, and they were unable to manage risk or estimate beyond random guesses.
And, it's unlikely that such a person can forecast or expand business safely
without at least some trusted advisors.

~~~
jjeaff
Do most people really think that?

I think Paul Graham uses the term "scalable". But I have seen talking points
from lots of big VCs and other figures in business who seem to think it's more
about age, profitability, and management structure that define a startup.

To focus on the scalability point, I tend to agree that many only think of
scalable businesses as startups, but I think the predicted numbers don't have
to be in the billions to be considered a scalable growth business.

If you are a one man shop building an innovative product and you raised seed
money from friends and family and hire 2 employees and expect to start making
$1m a year as a 3 man shop in a few years, I think most people would call that
a startup.

On the other hand, if you raise funds and build just another restaurant on the
corner but with no innovation in either product or scale, then I think you are
a small business.

~~~
afpx
You made me curious, so I did some quick investigation on the etymology of the
word. :) (sorry, insomnia)

Using Google NGram viewer, I looked up "startup" and quickly noticed that the
word (in modern usage) seemed to be short for "startup costs". Interestingly,
"startup costs" seemed to only come into use after the 60s and 70s and was
often connected to financial instruments. So, I also plotted the word
"options" and was surprised that the shape of that curve was the same as the
curve for "startup". They just had different magnitudes.

I also learned that stock options became tradable instruments in the 70s. And,
also, startups began being formed in the 70s. That is, they seemed to go hand
in hand. In particular "startup" was used to describe speculative research and
development ventures with high capital requirements.

More recently though, the word "startup" became being associated with small
teams, minimum viable products, and micro seed funding. So, that could be what
you mean.

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PaulRobinson
I was a consultant for a bunch of startups for 4-5 years, selling my services
as a "CTO for hire" to them, and was full-time CTO in multiple startups to
boot.

I had a general line/rule of thumb. At < 6 engineers, you had to write code
regularly as the team was so small it couldn't carry the weight of a member of
the tech team who didn't commit regularly.

At 12+ engineers, you didn't have time to in order to do the other work
(management, prioritisation, reports, strategic thinking, etc.), well enough.

At 6-12 engineers (where I spent most of my time), I didn't have time to write
code, but had to in order to keep the company moving. Cue 60-100 hour weeks
for 10 years. Yeah.

I went to quite a few CTO events, and in all honesty, it was a surprise to
many of them that I both knew how to code and that actually spent any time
doing it. I thought it was insane that there are CTOs - many of them - that
aren't interested in the practice of creating technology at a hands-on level,
but I could also understand how that happened: in my location (London), it's
quite normal for non-tech CTOs to pick up from founding CTOs after a few
years.

It's a weird situation to be in, and eventually a couple of years ago I
decided to evaluate what I wanted and wrote a list of what I liked and didn't
like about my job as a CTO.

I realised all the things I enjoyed were actually the responsibilities of a
senior engineer, and all the things I didn't like were the management and
board duties of being a CTO. Slept on it for a week, resigned, applied for
senior roles, and generally am much happier (2 years on).

It's worth really thinking about what you want from the role. If you're a co-
founder, you can shape it, but you have responsibilities to your investors,
wider board, exec team, managers and developers. Most importantly, your have
responsibilities to yourself.

Choose your own adventure when it comes to being a CTO, but choose wisely and
carefully.

~~~
athesyn
What is a non-tech CTO?

~~~
blowski
One previous CTO of mine frequently told us he hadn't written a line of code
since the late 1970s, and even then he hadn't done much. He didn't know what
an SSH key was, didn't know the difference between FTP and HTTP, and hadn't
heard of MySQL (this was mid 2000s).

He had two excellent abilities: convincing the board to give more money to IT,
and hiring good people to spend the money wisely.

~~~
mathattack
That's key to mgmt though it can be hard to hire people when you don't have
the skills to judge.

~~~
brianwawok
Its hard to hire pepple you do have the skills to judge.

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cynusx
Primary goal of CTO's is to make sure that the technology serves the business.
As C-suite, you are also involved in setting the company strategy and are
responsible for building the technical organization to own it.

Outside of executing the core strategy you can take an opportunistic approach
to:

1/ create more strategic options for the company

2/ cut costs by automating or re-engineering business processes

3/ deliver an unfair technical advantage over competitors

4/ improve reliability of service

5/ introduce more technology in the rest of the business (sales, marketing,
operations, ..)

Startup CTO's tend to combine many different roles as there are more roles
than people to fulfill them. Generally startup CTO's wind up also doing
product management, engineering management (people, culture), recruitment,
SCRUM master, IT, support, BI, architecting and programming.

What you actually wind up doing depends on the needs of the business and the
available talent in the company to delegate these roles to.

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jandrewrogers
The split between VPE and CTO is that a VPE is _operational_ and _internal-
facing_ whereas a CTO is _strategic_ and _external-facing_. Neither role
involves coding if your company has a dozen engineers; senior individual
contributors usually have a title like Chief Scientist or Distinguished
Engineer.

A CTO role is essentially that of a Technical Product Manager. What
distinguishes it from a traditional TPM is that, to do the role well, you also
take on the aspect of being the technical "moral authority" for the company,
setting the _de facto_ engineering culture, and creating a compelling vision
that goes beyond product management.

~~~
taurath
I've seen it where they hire almost 80% junior programmers and have the CTO
set the tone and pace and learning environment. It worked pretty well
actually, but the core technology wasn't groundbreaking, more of a
relationship based business doing complex CRUD.

~~~
AznHisoka
all the rules go out the window if you are just building a CRUD app. i have
seen non technical founders outsource everything to third world countries and
still be successful.

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truesy
Seems like I read a different take on CTOs / VPEs every week or two. I've been
a VPE several times, and as a cofounder. I, personally, think that a company
should never have a CTO until you split the role into two; a CTO & a VPE
working alongside each other. In that situation, the VPE manages the team,
makes sure things get done, etc. While the CTO is working with other "C-staff"
planning the longer (year+ out) roadmap of the company, with a focus on
Engineering.

I have struggled with these roles and names, similar to Bryan Helmig, the
author of this post. I have consulted with some former bosses, that now lead
engineering teams at some of the larger companies here in the bay area, and
have come to the conclusion that most CTOs are really VPEs, just using the
wrong title, but in the end, the title does not really matter. Since it is
extremely flexible in definition.

~~~
cookiecaper
C-levels are, first and foremost, performers. They should not be invested with
real authority; they should just be the set of pretty faces that get trotted
out to the media, run conference calls, give presentations, and sit on sales
meetings. They are media, PR, and sales operatives.

A position in the C-suite is a nightmare for anyone who wants to do serious
work, and there is no reason that people who have a primarily external focus
should be invested with the authority to destroy the internals.

~~~
jstalin
Weird, as a COO this doesn't accurately describe me or my peers in the
slightest bit. Sounds like you had a bitter experience somewhere along the way
with a bad team.

~~~
cookiecaper
Nah, I disagree. I'm not really bitter and I haven't met a C-suite that openly
acknowledged their role as performers (though they are probably aware of it).
There are a lot of people with strong non-performance skills who wind up in
these roles (and I have met several such persons) because they're recognized
as the most important leadership roles, and most people aren't going to say
"no" to that.

But by that same token, the super-high visibility of the C-suite comes with a
lot of constraints that hinder the freedom of people who are not primarily
interested in the dog and pony show, because there is an expectation that CxOs
will have a presence at various functions, meetings, and events that are not
really related to their ostensible job functions, and because every public
action of a CxO is subject to intense external scrutiny, including social
media, etc.

Could a CxO come on HN and state his true opinions about things? Of course
they would _say_ they can, because the illusion loses its power when the
curtain is drawn back, and it'd be a big story that "CxO of ImportantCo admits
he's a big fat phony".

If their employer is small enough that nobody cares, then I'm sure it works
fine because no one really cares. But if they get bigger, then it doesn't work
fine anymore, and their history will be combed through by competitors and
media alike in search of ammunition/scalps.

Really just need to get actors or media personalities for those roles so that
real people can continue to be real and guide things intelligently, rather
than constantly maintaining their persona and having to pull away from serious
matters to attend irrelevant functions and presentations (schmoozing).

You can't really give the title "CxO" to people and not expect this kind of
intrusive, restrictive, and distracting load to land on them, so it's better
to compartmentalize the real tasks away from such titles.

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hota_mazi
CTO as a startup cofounder and CTO of a large (100+) company are such
different roles that they should really have different names.

If you're CTO because you co-founded the company or you joined at an early
stage and you just happened to be the most senior engineer at the time, you
really have no idea what being CTO of a large company is like.

~~~
AznHisoka
and thr same can be said of a CEO, COO, etc. Job titles are really meaningless
in startups so who cares whether someone calls themselves a CTO or not?

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joshribakoff
I view the cto as the person who makes sure the 6 developers aren't using 6
different frameworks. I've worked at places where that was the case and the
CEO knew nothing about coding and didn't offer much more advice than "you guys
work it out". The problem is you sometimes get a dev who wants to use "insert
esoteric bleeding edge tool here" and then leaves a huge mess when they leave
the company 3 months later

~~~
mattchamb
I am literally leaving a failed company just like that, except the CTO is
sticking around, and he is the one using the bleeding edge tools without
collaborating with the rest of the team.

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alexandercrohde
I don't see value in this article. The author asks a bunch of other people in
high tech positions what they believe CTO should be. Unfortunately the plural
of anecdote is not data.

For example "Don't innovate in the management structure." Sure if you're an
average person, then don't. But some companies have (Valve, young Google) and
shown outstanding results.

I'm very skeptical of reducing the CTO title to rules like this. This is
garbage conversation fodder, it appeals to our weaker human side to create a
facade of self-improvement but none of us are gonna remember this article in 2
months.

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pouzy
Hello,

I'm having the same considerations and am writing about challenges CTOs of
startups of different sizes face on a daily basis on
[http://cto.pizza](http://cto.pizza)

The concept is simple: we talk about your growth, team and tech challenges
over a pizza. Let me know of any of you might be interested in grabbing one.

I'm based in Paris but we could figure something out over Skype or something
if you have interesting stories to share!

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shanwang
Good article, but why people are calling Software Engineers Hackers these
days?

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edoceo
Pretty smart article, good introspection, matches my experience and
observation. Thanks for this

