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Solo founder dilemma; CEO or CTO?

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Re: Solo founder dilemma; CEO or CTO?

#91

Post by kirso »

rubenfiszel wrote: post #74
mgaunard wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of tech incubators in the Paris area.

And VCs, but as much as I'd like it to not be the case, the US and the bay area in particular play at another level. The french ecosystem is getting really good at some forms of deep tech, but developer tools is not one of them, yet. The current government and station F have done wonders, we were 8 french startups at YC this year, the most populous of any other EU countries. Things are starting to change in the right…

I have spent the last 12 years in the startup ecosystems in US, Europe and Asia.

Europe progressed quite a lot and now can be considered a matured one, however compared to US and sophistication of investors, deal-making and deep-tech it is still a young adult compared to the season 50 years old American veteran with scars and experience.

APAC still a teenager in that sense but with a lot of spotlight.

Different cultures, mentality, support system and also chances of making it in the end. I feel like if you have a possibility to be close to the valley, your chances of making it are probably 50% higher than anywhere else in the world and that route actually makes sense.

Re: Solo founder dilemma; CEO or CTO?

#92

Post by kirso »

kinj28 wrote: post #90
swyx wrote: post #52

TIL about Tooljet from OP's post: https://www.tooljet.com/ between Retool, Budibase, Superblocks, and Tooljet, i'm confused about how to choose. anyone have a good mental map of the low code internal tools landscape?

To add to your confusion - try DronaHQ

And don't forget about Airplane.dev!

Re: Solo founder dilemma; CEO or CTO?

#93

Post by konfusinomicon »

anakaine wrote: post #89
konfusinomicon wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a co-founder, with the current CEO and one other guy who retired, and have always been on the engineering side of the business. at first, the engineering department was me, and support. I was super green back then and was pretty lucky to be at the right place at the right time and as such, the company grew far faster than myself. I have many superiors now, which is cool with me as I've continued learning and grow…

How have you found it starting as a co-founder and now having to report to others? For me personally, I don't think I'd have grown as graciously as you seem to have articulated that you have. I'd like to ha e retained a strong semblance of direction and control in the company as a co-founder.

it has been extremely challenging at times, especially the times where my voice fell upon deaf ears and the wrong direction was taken. ultimately every mistake, your own or otherwise, is a learning experience, and every success is just the same.

for the most part though, I am involved quite a bit in the technical direction we are taking, so i dont feel as if ive been completely pushed out. I've now lived through several leadership shakeups and kind of glad that the stress of knowing the board could axe me at any time is mostly not on me. my historical knowledge of the system and domain alone is enough to guarantee job security and my compensation remains competitive

given that chances like this are extremely rare, I've committed to riding it out to liquidity or the ship sinks, and learning as much as I can until then.

Re: Solo founder dilemma; CEO or CTO?

#96

Post by manv1 »

navaneethpk wrote: post #29
e1g wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s perhaps worth highlighting how much of an outlier your experience was - having a social circle to intro investors, inbound interest, and closing a $1.5M institutional seed round within two weeks is a highly atypical trajectory for solo founders with negligible traction.

> having a social circle to intro investors > with negligible traction Disagreeing to these two points. The traction from HN & ProductHunt launch was good that ToolJet got 1000+ stars on GitHub in under 8 hours. The intros were made mostly by great open-source founders who were totally strangers at the time who discovered the project mostly from HN.

Interesting that you used ProductHunt. I looked at their site and couldn't figure out if anyone actually paid attention to it. I suppose for tech journalists and investors it's a better place to find interesting stuff than PR newswire?

Re: Solo founder dilemma; CEO or CTO?

#97

Post by rishabhkaul1 »

anakaine wrote: post #88
swyx wrote: post #52

TIL about Tooljet from OP's post: https://www.tooljet.com/ between Retool, Budibase, Superblocks, and Tooljet, i'm confused about how to choose. anyone have a good mental map of the low code internal tools landscape?

You might also consider appsmith. We found it had a few more options. In the end, they're all pretty good

Thanks for mentioning Appsmith (I work there)! We've been busy at work!

Re: Solo founder dilemma; CEO or CTO?

#98

Post by necovek »

rubenfiszel wrote: post #16

Just want to add, I followed pretty much the same path with Windmill [1], which is also in the developer tool space, and also open-source. Built everything solo for 5 months. I thought it would be impossible to get into YC, it is not and I was fortunate enough to join YC on the latest batch, on my first try [2]. Getting into YC changed the course of the company, increased many orders of magnitude my ambition and made…

I know the original windmill (getwindmill.com) is long outdated and abandoned, but it's still too early to reuse names in the same space, IMHO. At least for us old-timers :)

Good luck with the product, but it took me a while to understand that this has nothing to do with the "original" Windmill (it's waay too similar).

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