Ask HN: What does it take to be a CTO?

Hi,

A friend of mine and I are thinking of starting a company together. My friend is a sales/marketing person (CEO), and I'm the (only) technical person (CTO).

I want to know what it really takes to be a CTO. On one end, I see people starting companies directly after their college as a CTO. On the other end, I see people who were architects at FAANG, built massive open-source projects before starting their companies as CTO. I'm somewhere in between - I have a few years of experience at FAANG as a Senior ML Engineer, but most of my work has been on platform/ML research rather than things like full stack development, deployment, etc.

I am trying to figure out if I'm capable enough to be a CTO. I understand there will be a lot of on-the-job learning, but my question is more about how much I should already know on day one.

The question is deliberately a little vague as it's tough to convey my full background. I would appreciate any tips or suggestions here.

I think the most important trait of any CTO is to be technical enough to understand what the best choice of tools to use is to accomplish the goals of the business you are running. You will be doing all of the coding at the beginning since your co-founder is not technical, but the important thing to remember is that the choices you make now while acting as the only developer at the company will greatly influence decisions you will make later once you are able to do more CTO level duties (how many devs to hire, how easy it is to find good talent to hire, etc…)

It’s easy to just keep being a developer and making choices on how the tech stack works based on things engineers care about, but you need to be able to say no to things that don’t make sense for the business. The new engineer wants to rewrite the API in a language that no one else is familiar with for performance reasons? No. The team wants to go to a micro service architecture before you have product market for? No. There will be some cases where the answer is yes of course but it should be justified why this is needed and you need to be able to understand technically what the impact will be of each decision.

You likely have the skills to get a product out the door, especially if you find a way to step back or have someone ask you diligently "can we skip this", "can we not reinvent this", "is this overengineering?", "what's the one we should prioritise, and the one we should drop?'. Especially if you've been doing ML research and fiddling about - there is limited time for that.

The problems you might have are along the lines of when you get lots of customers. Scaling is horrible for tech, especially anything involving cloud quota requests or newer libraries. You will have the secondary issue of customer support, which at first you can deal with, but quickly can zap 50% of your productivity due to random requests. For CTOs, try and get a reliable dev on your team to take increasing support workload, or hire a dedicated support role.

The two problems you face as a succeeding CTO are quite different. So really do ask yourself how you would handle the customer support issues. The type of startup matters here. Is this urgent for every client, if it breaks? How would you feel if a ping came in at 10:40pm? If your great 5* rating drops to 4* because of bad support, who takes responsibility? Do you entrust your CEO to understand the importance of segmenting support duties from development to ensure your velocity can stay decent?

+ add on presentation and graph making skills if you are raising investment

>I am trying to figure out if I'm capable enough to be a CTO..... but my question is more about how much I should already know on day one.

It depends on the type of Start up, is it an SaaS, or ML / AI based company.

You will actually have to understand more about your business goals, than any other programmers below your organisation.

You should say "No" to 99.9999999% of suggestions using the latest and most hyped technology.

Your choice of Technology is likely only there to achieve your business goals, not for your inner child or colleagues to have a playground and mark another thing on their CV / resume.

You will also have to set reasonable schedules and timeline. And be able to deliver them on time.

And here is another unpopular opinion.

Your biggest fight may likely not be your subordinate but with your co-founder / CEO.

> * anything by Marty vegan

Lol. Sorry about this, I was typing this on my phone while eating dinner.

Marty Cagan is the author. Inspired and Empowered are the books.