Startups: You Don’t Need a CTO (Yet)
“My technical co-founder just quit,” she says, “and he took all of the product code with him. Now I have to negotiate to get my product back.”
“I had to fire my CTO last week,” he says, swirling the coffee in his mug and looking around the coffee shop. “The entire engineering team quit within a few days, so now I’m just hoping nothing breaks before I can hire some people to review the code and learn how it all works.”
I hear stories like this all the time from the startups that I work with and from other startup mentors. Companies who are just starting to get traction are suddenly paralyzed by a loss of technical leadership and lose precious time, money, and reputation strength as they rebuild. The cause: hiring a CTO too early.
Every software company needs technical leadership, and it can seem especially critical in the early stages, but do you need a CTO right out of the gate? Tradition (and perhaps investors) would say so, but experience says otherwise. I couldn’t find statistics on this anywhere, which is a telling fact all by itself, but anecdotally I can say that a majority of successful startups go through two or more CTOs in their first five years of existence (otherwise known as The Investor Financial Model Horizon). Why is this, and what should you do about it?
