

Question About Getting a CTO - ch00ey

All right, so i am currently in the idea stages of the start up still in the midst of learning what Customer Development is and all that jazz. I am also a student at a university, and I'm planning on looking for a CTO/Co-founder at the university as well.<p>So my question to everyone is; as a student what should I look for in a CTO in regards to education, more specifically should I look at people in Software Engineering, Computer Science or Computer Engineering?<p>Thanks a TON in advanced!<p>- Jordan
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devmonk
No idea what the startup is or what you are trying to do, so no idea what you
would need in a CTO or why you'd need one before you have anything else.

I worked for a startup where the president/founder of the company's friend
created a single webpage for the company with a way to contact him. The domain
name was good enough, so that was the start of the tech side. Hard to believe
in this day and age, but that was the late 90s. After that, a (young) teenager
wrote the webapp that ran the company's primary service. This person became
the CTO, then was replaced by the former person who wrote the original webpage
(that's right- just a page), but who was a Linux guru, could do the site,
basically somewhat handled marketing, etc.

I recently read this: [http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/13808/The-Magical-
Found...](http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/13808/The-Magical-Founding-
Team-Mix-For-Web-Startups.aspx)

which basically says the founders should be in this order:

1\. Developer.

2\. Designer / UI / UX person.

3\. Inbound Marketer.

4\. Sales Person.

One thing I can say for sure is that if you aren't technical and you are going
to rely on someone you just picked up to basically run the engine of your
company, you may just be dreaming.

If you have to pick anyone, make sure it is:

1\. Not a friend

2\. Someone you'd want to go camping with and vice versa (Sorry, I can't find
the link for where that was suggested.)

3\. A combination developer and server/networking geek. For a CTO this day and
age in a startup, they should know Linux in and out, OS X in and out
(seriously, a good sign is a macbook pro as client), know whatever your site
is to be developed in (PhP, Ruby, Java, etc.), DNS, Apache, Passenger,
Mongrel2, Tomcat, JBoss, etc. (depending on PhP, Ruby, Java, etc.), understand
hosting and cloud services in current day and age, etc. They should live that
stuff. There is no major for that. It is just a matter of interest and talent.
It could be an English major.

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minalecs
I'm also not familiar with what you're doing, but I think you'd be lucky
finding anyone that would be willing to work for just equity for some student.
I think you should focus on finding a partnership with someone with some
technical skills rather than trying to fill a cto position.

