No, I want a CTO, and certainly not a contractor who will act like an owner. (I've said many times in this thread that I am not looking for contractors, and state on the jobs page that I'm seeking full-time permanent employees).
To answer your question: what I'd want is a stake in the equity and governance of the company. These things aren't unusual when joining a new company, and in my prior two ventures (futurescaper.com, imatest.com), I've hired both CTOs and CEOs without difficulty, and successfully integrated them into the governance of the companies.
Somehow, this time around, my recruiting efforts seem to be generating a crazy number of misunderstandings. People assume that I'm looking for contractors (I'm not). People assume that I won't be paying competitive salaries (I will be). People assume that I won't be giving away equity (I will be). People assume that I won't be including officers of the company in its governance (I will be). And people make these assumptions even when my job descriptions explicitly say otherwise. I'm baffled by this, since I haven't encountered these presumptions with my prior startups.
I'm starting to wonder if developers in the web application space have perhaps been so badly burned by prior startup experiences that at this point they basically presume bad faith from any new venture they encounter. If so, that's really unfortunate, and I guess there's nothing I can do about it except either A.) hide the fact that I'm a startup (which would hardly be honest), or B.) Accept that that 90% of prospective candidates will weed themselves out simply by making bad assumptions, and realise that I probably didn't want those people anyway.
Also, I have to say that this experience is also starting to really warm me up to recruiters, who presumably are more skilled than I at dealing with the sort of industry dynamics that lead to these kind of misunderstandings.
To answer your question: what I'd want is a stake in the equity and governance of the company. These things aren't unusual when joining a new company, and in my prior two ventures (futurescaper.com, imatest.com), I've hired both CTOs and CEOs without difficulty, and successfully integrated them into the governance of the companies.
Somehow, this time around, my recruiting efforts seem to be generating a crazy number of misunderstandings. People assume that I'm looking for contractors (I'm not). People assume that I won't be paying competitive salaries (I will be). People assume that I won't be giving away equity (I will be). People assume that I won't be including officers of the company in its governance (I will be). And people make these assumptions even when my job descriptions explicitly say otherwise. I'm baffled by this, since I haven't encountered these presumptions with my prior startups.
I'm starting to wonder if developers in the web application space have perhaps been so badly burned by prior startup experiences that at this point they basically presume bad faith from any new venture they encounter. If so, that's really unfortunate, and I guess there's nothing I can do about it except either A.) hide the fact that I'm a startup (which would hardly be honest), or B.) Accept that that 90% of prospective candidates will weed themselves out simply by making bad assumptions, and realise that I probably didn't want those people anyway.
Also, I have to say that this experience is also starting to really warm me up to recruiters, who presumably are more skilled than I at dealing with the sort of industry dynamics that lead to these kind of misunderstandings.