Dragă SaaStr: Ce face un CTO rău?
Deși nu există o definiție legală pentru CTO 🙂 sau o linie strălucitoare între CTO și VPE, aș sugera că un CTO start-up trebuie să facă doar câteva lucruri - care sunt foarte dificile:
- Adunați o echipă mică (3–9) de ingineri foarte buni
- Sunt super agile
- That can ship a lot of very functional, very clever code that supports early, very rapid growth (from a very small base); and
- That can react and positively respond to a whole ton of issues, from downtime, to security, to API issues, and so much more. That often were never anticipated and aren’t part of the job spec.
So … a “bad” CTO is one that can’t recruit a strong “pizza box” team. A bad CTO is an OK engineer him or herself but can’t get 3 other great engineers to join him/her.
A “bad” CTO isn’t agile enough, and can’t push out quick releases and features to save big deals, fix terrible bugs, etc. A “bad” CTO sometimes wants to do this, but just isn’t good enough. Or a “bad” CTO is a bit too unmotivated / whatever to do what it takes to keep up.
A “bad” CTO doesn’t care about growing very, very quickly. So much changes once you have your first few customers. It’s exciting — but also tiring and very stressful. A great CTO embraces this change, participates actively in it, and drives it. A bad CTO resists the change that come with scaling the early customer base.
A “bad” CTO doesn’t think it’s their problem when things have to change, a lot. When the customer base changes. When the product ends up having to go in a very different direction than everyone thought at first.
This skillset is critical but then later … but a lot of it does not scale. The skills it takes to build a clever hack with a small team, and iterate that hack very rapidly to respond to customer and market needs … are not the same skills it takes to scale from 10–100 engineers. To refactor the codebase. To ship truly enterprise-grade software. To walk into a room full of CIOs and instill confidence.
Uneori, CTO-urile pot deveni adevărați VP de Inginerie. Dar de obicei, ei nu vor. Ei doresc ca compania să aducă un manager adevărat care să extindă echipa dincolo de 1-2 cutii de pizza. În timp ce CTO se poate concentra pe a face lucruri super agile, de generația următoare.
In SaaS, plan to recruit a true VP of Engineering around $5m-$8m in ARR. You’ll need her by then. They can take over the routine stuff. Once you transition into a phase where more of it is … routine.
(note: an update of a classic SaaStr answer)
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And for an example of a great startup CTO, here is one:
- 2019
- Despre Noi
- agil
- api
- în jurul
- Pic
- gandaci
- construi
- Campanie
- pasă
- Schimbare
- Capitol
- clasic
- cod
- companie
- încredere
- conţinut
- critic
- CTO
- clienţii care
- de date
- Oferte
- diferit
- Nu
- nefuncționare
- Devreme
- se încheie
- inginer
- Inginerie
- inginerii
- etc
- exemplu
- DESCRIERE
- First
- Repara
- Concentra
- Complet
- bine
- mare
- Crește
- În creştere
- Creștere
- hack
- având în
- aici
- HTTPS
- probleme de
- IT
- ianuarie
- Loc de munca
- alătura
- Legal
- Linie
- Piață
- mai mult
- Altele
- fază
- Pizza
- Problemă
- Produs
- Reacţiona
- Lansări
- SaaS
- Scară
- scalare
- securitate
- aptitudini
- mic
- So
- Software
- Discovery
- lansare
- puternic
- Sprijină
- gândit
- Tonă
- Actualizează
- obișnuit
- Ce
- youtube