"If you could just build the product, hire the team, and prepare an investor presentation by Monday, that'd be great...."
You finally did it: after years of building software for someone else, you took the leap and joined a startup. Now you’re building software for yourself. All the risk (and a 30% stake in the rewards) is yours. Then comes the day when your co-founders ask that fateful question: “What title do you want?”
You’ll be tempted, my friend, to reach for that brass ring, to claim the right of First Techie, to confidently say, “Why, CTO, of course!”
Hold on there, Tiger.
Sure, it looks great on a business card and your mom will be impressed, just as soon as you explain to her, for the hundredth time, what you do. And it will be nice to go to the next tech meetup and tell strangers that you’re the CTO for that tech company that they haven’t heard of (yet). And for a while those will be the only changes. But wait, there’s more.
Do you like meetings? Because you’re going to be attending a lot of them (and even hosting a few yourself!). Investor meetings, strategy meetings, planning sessions, interviews – your day is going to be chock-full of talking, so go buy a notebook and prepare to sit there pretending to take notes just like all the other senior leaders. You can try to get out of them by being cranky every time someone wants to talk to you or by claiming to be too busy writing code – and I'm sure that’s what you’d rather be doing – but it won’t work. You’re in charge of a whole chunk of the company now, so get ready to represent.
I’m sure that you love problem-solving – you wouldn’t have gone into engineering if you didn't – but how do you feel about people problems? You don’t have to worry about that too much when the development team is you and maybe one other person, but what about after that Series A round? You’re in charge now, so you get to build a team! Interviews, coding tests, career discussions, mediating personal disputes… Remember looking at your Director of Engineering at your old workplace and thinking, “I am so glad that I don’t have her job”? Guess what, now you do, plus your own!
As CTO, you’re in charge of the whole thing: people, processes, and technology! And while code might be complex, at least it’s consistent: the same command will behave the same way today and tomorrow as is did yesterday. People, on the other hand, are messy. They have moods, frustrations, and personal lives that impact how they feel when they come to work. Your best engineer today could be a hot mess tomorrow, and it’s your job to straighten them out. Forget about writing code: you’re a bio-hacker now.
Some people like this kind of thing. They even see it as the next challenge in their careers, an opportunity to step up from “just an engineer” to “an engineering leader.” They don’t mind getting messy and maybe even get excited about measuring their output in terms of the work they do through others rather than what they deliver on their own. They’re ready to stop building code and start building companies. Others, though, fall for the title and look back a year later thinking, “Dear God, what have I done?” They self-destruct.
Are you longing yet for those quiet days where you could just put on your headphones and code? It’s not too late to avoid this trap. This time, when your co-founders come around handing out titles, look at them calmly and say:
“How about Chief Scientist?”