Life of a Startup CTO 👑
What is your job as a CTO as you move through various stages of your company growth.
The startup scene here in Italy is pretty small. This is most often a problem, but it also means that the community is tight-knit and we all know each other.
Since I founded my startup, in 2012, I have often been involved in mentoring other early-stage founders and CTOs. I still do it today.
The most recurring question I get from CTOs is: what should I focus on? Or, if you prefer — how should I spend my time?
Answering this directly is close to impossible, because the CTO role depends on many factors. In my experience, the three most relevant ones are:
📱 Product / Business — the nature of your product deeply affects your role. If your tech is mostly a commodity (e.g. you are building yet another SaaS), your main concern will be to go fast, stay lean, and not reinvent the wheel. If your product involves a strong technical challenge, instead, you may need a more deliberate approach, and focus on quality from the get-go.
🏢 Size / stage of your company — like all executive roles, being a CTO is a shapeshifting duty that changes with the scale of your team. What you do when you are 5 people resembles nothing of what you do when you are 50, or 500.
👑 Executive team — much of your scope is shaped by the qualities and gaps of your peers. What are your co-founders / other execs good at? The best teams fill each other’s gaps. I have met CTOs who were a lot into product because the CEO was more into (e.g.) business development, and viceversa.
Nevertheless, there are some common traits about the work of the best CTOs I have known. To understand them, let’s start with the three main responsibilities you have to cover in early stage startups: Tech, Product, and Marketing.
Such areas are not clear-cut and often have big overlaps. For example:
SEO is a marketing / distribution topic that also requires a strong technical work.
Refer-a-friend strategies are both non-trivial product features and distribution channels.
A good technical strategy often informs the product of what can be built. Famously, Steve Jobs decided to build the iPhone after he saw a prototype of a multi-touch screen in the lab.
The biggest overlap of all, though, lies at the center, and is about process — that is, how people work together.
Out of the various leadership roles, CTOs are the ones who most likely take care of this. That’s both because of their engineering mindset — they often see the company as a system, and act accordingly — and because in tech startups the engineering dept often ends up being the largest (or one of the largest), so there is more need for structure.
This article covers what you should focus on as a CTO when it comes to tech and process.
I will do so for three different stages of a startup's life:
🌱 Pre-seed — where you learn more about the problem / solution space.
🪴 Seed — where you look for product-market fit.
🌳 Series A — where you scale your product and business for the first time.
Sure, there are more ones! But these are those I am the most familiar with — and are also where the most action happens.
Let’s go 👇
🌱 Pre-seed
The pre-seed stage is an exploratory one. You may start with some assumptions about the problem you are going to solve and how, but you better approach this with an open mind.
Some of these assumptions will hold, but most won’t. Does this problem exist? How can I solve it for people? Are people willing to pay? Who are my ideal customers? How do I reach them?
1) Team
At the beginning it’s just about you, your co-founders, and maybe a couple of friends.
As long as your team is <10 people, your best bet is to just hire smart generalists, rather than people who are big on some specific tech. For many reasons:
You still have no idea about the tech to use — and even if you do, such an idea is likely to change.
Generalists are usually open and happy to use what is best to deliver the product. Specialists, instead, are more likely to feel the urge to use whatever they know better, even if it is the suboptimal choice.
As a CTO, you should assemble a founding engineering team that is flexible and capable of growing together with your company.
2) Process
At this scale, communication is easy and there is no need to set up fancy processes. Just focus on creating a basic work loop. This is what it may look like:
🔨 Weekly dev cycle — you may have a lightweight planning at the beginning, and a demo for the whole team at the end. You still want to ship things ASAP, likely multiple times a day. The weekly ceremonies just help with pacing and with keeping everyone on the same page.
🎯 Monthly goals — a longer timeframe cycle is useful to anchor things you don’t want to do every week. You may do some product strategy, set targets for your KPIs, and have retrospectives.
☀️ Standups — I am a big fan of async standups. They take 5 mins of your time, force you to reflect on your day, and solve 80% of the blockers / coordination problems that may arise.
This is not a one-size-fits-all recipe. You should experiment and stick with what works for you. We used to run Scrum — then, over time, we changed the parts we didn’t like and tweaked them until we were happy with the result.
3) Tech
When you think about tech at this stage, there are two mental models that I find to be the most useful: