Dear SaaStr: What Makes a Bad CTO?
While there is no legal definition for CTO 🙂 or bright line between CTO and VPE, I’d suggest a start-up CTO really only has to do a few things — which are very hard:
- Assemble a small team (3–9) of very good engineers
- That are 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.
Sometimes, CTOs can grow into true VPs of Engineering. But just as often, they don’t want to. They want the company to bring in a true manager to scale the team beyond 1–2 pizza boxes. While the CTO can focus on doing super agile, next-generation things.
In SaaS, plan to recruit a true VP of Engineering around $8m-$10m in ARR at least. You’ll need them by then. They can take over the routine stuff. Once you transition into a phase where more of it is … routine.
…
And for an example of a great startup CTO, here is one:
