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Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?

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Re: Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?

#131

Post by elamje »

pixelmonkey wrote: post #38

I was CTO of a startup from pre-seed stage ($0 raised, bootstrapping) thru Series A + B stages ($millions raised, scaling). I then promoted a senior engineer to the CTO role, around the time that we had ~20-30 engineers organized into sub-teams with engineering leads. As part of that, I ran an engineering management book club internally for the new CTO and engineering leads (which was also open to any engineers to jo…

Hey Andrew!

Thanks for sharing all the resources and giving me guidance a few years ago. Still very thankful for a few of your posts and pointing me to read Venture Deals, all made me a much better CTO and founder. Hope your current journey is going great!

Re: Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?

#132

Post by 0x54MUR41 »

I would like to add a book called "Think Like a CTO" [0] by Alan Williamson. The author has experiences as a CTO in different companies. He also give a lot of advice. The book is not only applicable for CTOs, but also other leadership roles. It discusses various topics from team management to technology decisions.

edit: the book was already mentioned by mattferderer [1].

[0]: https://www.manning.com/books/think-like-a-cto

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38809998

Re: Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?

#134

Post by pixelmonkey »

elamje wrote: post #131
pixelmonkey wrote: post #38

I was CTO of a startup from pre-seed stage ($0 raised, bootstrapping) thru Series A + B stages ($millions raised, scaling). I then promoted a senior engineer to the CTO role, around the time that we had ~20-30 engineers organized into sub-teams with engineering leads. As part of that, I ran an engineering management book club internally for the new CTO and engineering leads (which was also open to any engineers to jo…

Hey Andrew! Thanks for sharing all the resources and giving me guidance a few years ago. Still very thankful for a few of your posts and pointing me to read Venture Deals, all made me a much better CTO and founder. Hope your current journey is going great!

Glad to hear it was helpful!

Re: Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?

#135

Post by _jal »

Jtsummers wrote: post #107
_jal wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When does Simone become something else?

Simone as a feminine or masculine name depends on the language and country. Simone in French is feminine, and in Italian (so a reasonable interpretation here given the last name) is masculine. In the US (and, from what I've seen, other English speaking countries) the name is brought in from French and generally considered feminine (barring being in an Italian community, I've met a couple Simone men, but often the nam…

I can't tell if this is typical hn pedantry or genuine misunderstanding, so I'll point out that I was not referring to "some entity named Simone", I was referring to the particular Simone in this very comment thread, for whom we have strong evidence about preferred pronouns.

> Of course, it's still safer to look them up if you don't actually know the person in question and want to use he or she.

Physician, heal thyself.

Re: Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?

#136

Post by Rastonbury »

AC_8675309 wrote: post #116

If I were a CEO and my CTO asked that question I would start looking for a new CTO. Sorry, not a helpful answer...

Great CEO here, firing your first time CTO for asking for advice on something they've never done before

Re: Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?

#137

Post by AC_8675309 »

Rastonbury wrote: post #136
AC_8675309 wrote: post #116

If I were a CEO and my CTO asked that question I would start looking for a new CTO. Sorry, not a helpful answer...

Great CEO here, firing your first time CTO for asking for advice on something they've never done before

You are taking a massive corporate risk by bringing in someone who doesn't know what they are doing.

I would be equally worried if I was the director of engineering and had to work with this person. Ditto if I was a lower level engineer.

If I had to guess the poster is actually talking about engineering and confusing it with technology ... which is a whole different problem.

Re: Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?

#138

Post by wlonkly »

rdli wrote: post #78

I think the #1 thing when you become part of an exec team is that you should be optimizing for the _business_, and not your function. The working assumption is that you will keep your function executing and delivering, but what is really hard is helping to figure out what the right decisions are for the business. Should we invest more in product or sales? What if there’s a huge top of funnel problem — what can we do…

This is one of the points made in Patrick Lencioni's "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team", which I've always found a valuable read.

A warning, though: it's a "business fable", where he gets his point across by telling a fictional story. Business writers tend to be pretty terrible fiction writers so it's corny, but it also makes it a pretty light read.

Re: Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?

#140

Post by simonebrunozzi »

rwmj wrote: post #44
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #34

I've been a CTO a couple of times (VMware, startup), I don't think I'm a good one (I am better as an individual contributor, rather than as a manager), but I have one piece of advice for you: ignore books, or use them as secondary source of truth. You should instead TALK to long-time or former CTOs and ask them for advice. You won't find that advice in any book. It's invaluable.

How/where did you find former CTOs to talk to?

I guess it was easy for me. Before becoming CTO at VMware, I was Senior Technology Evangelist at AWS, and was very well known in the Cloud Computing space. I met a ton of startups and larger companies, mostly on the technical side, so I knew a lot of people.

I also helped many of them a lot during my years at AWS, and most of them were very eager to give me a hand / provide advice.

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