Do you really need a CTO? 🤔
Who is a CTO and what do they do? 🦸♂️
In a nutshell, CTOs are business stakeholders with an engineering mindset.
CTOs, the orchestrators of innovation in the modern business landscape, embody a remarkable synergy of strategic acumen and engineering finesse. In the intricate tapestry of tech startups, their pivotal role transcends mere titles, as they masterfully fuse the ethereal realm of technology with the pragmatic realm of business. As conductors of the digital symphony, CTOs empower the very essence of growth by entrusting technology to navigate the voyage towards prosperity, steering the ship of business with the compass of code.
Thus, they stand not merely as stakeholders, but as the architects of a harmonious future where bits and bytes paint the canvas of success.
Epic CTO hiring fail 🙂
One of our portfolio companies in the fintech domain hired a hotshot CTO (let’s call him X). This guy perfectly tick-marked all the pointers you would ideally look for in a CTO.
- Leading massive and high-performing tech teams, check ✅
- Building several products at a crazy scale, check ✅
- Pedigree to die for, check ✅
Unfortunately, the founders and X couldn’t vibe.
- X wanted to drive as much impact as possible through tech. Founders wanted tech to work more as an enabler
- For X, the tech should be a driver. X would get obsessed with the products his team delivered and would run various experiments to drive adoption.
- Turned out the founders hired X for optics and PR. They were still not ready to transfer the control to X
Hence, don’t EVER hire a CTO, if —
- your team is small; around 10–20 engineers or less, and you need sound engineers and managers. If you hire a hot-shot CTO, you will never be able to fuel their quest to solve challenging problems. Leading to frustration for both parties and ending it badly!
- you are an early-stage company and raised a few million dollars in funding. One of the founders should take up this role. In case, all are non-tech founders, hire a good manager or a lead! This also allows them to grow as a VP/CTO as the company grows and expectations are almost always aligned!
Don’t hire to manage. Hire to liberate yourself 💯
If you hire a CTO and you are still involved on day to day basis, then either you hired wrong or you are working wrong. Both need a major overhaul!
So when should you hire a CTO? 🙌🏼
- When you are ready to pass the baton and let this guy in the driver’s seat
- When you need someone to think beyond your current product through the lens of tech, data and AI
- When you are scaling like crazy and you have already accumulated a pile of tech debts
- When you have to attract excellent engineers for your team — they always look for a known face in the industry they can trust and learn from
- When tech starts becoming a black box for you, huge spillover in deliveries, recurring bugs, and unpredictable churn in the team
Let me know what you think! If you are facing a similar dilemma, let’s talk 🙂
Here is my calendly — https://calendly.com/sukantk/talk
