
Founding engineer or Founder/CTO? - mooreds
http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/2555
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fizx
Having been on both sides of the situation a couple times, the distinction is
pretty simple for me: do you have a seat on the board?

If you have a board seat, great, you're a real founder/CTO!

If you're not interested in the board seat or you're aware that you don't
bring enough to the table to earn it, you're a good candidate for a founding
engineer. You should be happy!

If the other founder(s) want you to be a founder/CTO without the board seat,
run! They're just using the prestige of the title to pay you less, and will
revoke it at the first convenience.

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mooreds
That's a great perspective and a great question to ask yourself: "do I want to
have a board seat, with everything that comes with that".

If you don't know what a board seat entails, well then you know what research
you have to do.

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CalChris
Most people don't understand boards and boards vary by company and over time.
Brad Feld, author of the excellent _Venture Deals_ , has another book _Startup
Boards: Getting the Most Out of Your Board of Directors_.

[https://www.amazon.com/Startup-Boards-Getting-Board-
Director...](https://www.amazon.com/Startup-Boards-Getting-Board-
Directors/dp/1118443667/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8)

~~~
mooreds
Thanks for the recommendation.

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jessmartin
As a current founder and CTO-by-title of a product company
([http://first.io](http://first.io)), I think you're missing one path the
founding engineer can take: run Product. Whether that eventually becomes a
Chief Product Officer or Head of Product or whatever, the founding engineer
often has a very strong sense of where the product needs to go and as the
organization grows, they ship less code and instead drive prioritization and
teams that execute on the higher-level product vision.

At least, that's what I'm trying to do. We'll see how it goes! :-P

Oh, and I have an awesome VPE already, which is a relief!

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mooreds
That's fair. I think that running product takes a lot of customer empathy and
you're right, the founding engineer can definitely be the customer advocate.
One worry I have would be whether someone in that role would be too interested
in the 'how' of building, rather than the 'what' and the 'why' which are so
important for product. Hope it works out for you!

Another role I left off was CEO, but that one seems less likely than product.

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mooreds
Oh no! I always meant to host my blog on s3, looks like I didn't do it soon
enough.

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miles_matthias
Do yourself one better -- through cloudfront in front of it. S3 has rate
limits too :)

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mooreds
Ha, I doubt any blog post I write will need more than s3's default performance
of 300/requests per second.

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/request-
rate-...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/request-rate-perf-
considerations.html)

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miles_matthias
Great post Dan! Especially appreciate the detailed explanation of a founding
engineer.

Also gave a +1 to fizx for the note about a board seat. Important for sure.

~~~
mooreds
Thanks for the discussion too--talking with you definitely crystallized some
of my thoughts about this topic.

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robbiet480
Seems the site is down and Google didn't get a good cache of it :(

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mooreds
Actually, here it is:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Xm4Ewpw...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Xm4EwpwUrS8J:www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/2555+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

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samoraai
Loved this post! Thanks for taking the time to write it

