Startup jobs: what’s it like being a startup CTO?

The term CTO is used at both multinational companies with millions of employees, as well as tiny startups with teams of less than 10. Experiences of the two positions, however, couldn’t be more different. 

At a startup, a CTO is likely to be a part of the founding team. CTOs are central to the search phase (discovering the direction of a business) and build phase of a business, especially if the CEO/co-founder(s) are from a non-technical background. Almost all CTOs come from technical backgrounds and it’s often the natural progression of responsibility for engineers or other technical professions. 

Stepping into a technical leadership position will grant you far more influence in the direction of a company. “I’m not in the startup world to sit quietly in the corner,” explains Paul Egan, CTO at Founders Factory. “You’re there to achieve bigger things, and have an impact on the business as a whole.”

This involves quite a transition, particularly in your way of thinking. CTOs should have an architectural view of the business and its technology, rather than focusing on the small minutiae. As a result, you should be empowering your team rather than doing it yourself. “Your mindset switches from ‘I need to do it’ to ‘I need to get it done’,” says Kunal Varma, CTO at ClearGlass. 

This can create a slight tension for many early stage CTOs—balancing the desire to get stuck in, with the need to be more managerial, can be tricky. Many will have chosen the career because of their love of programming, coding, etc, and it may feel difficult to leave that behind. 

Startup jobs: what skills and characteristics do startup CTOs need?

There are obvious technical skills that are important for any tech lead in a startup to have: this will largely depend on what you are building, and what sort of technology you are using. On top of this, however, there are several universal skills that will help you in your role as CTO.

Communication

Working between the CEO/founding team and the engineering team, CTOs act as a mediator. You need to translate the founding team’s vision into what that will look like from a practical perspective; and vice versa, you need to be able to communicate what your engineers are working on to the founding team.

“Take your ​head of client success. They don’t want to know exactly what’s being built, they want to know whether they’re able to onboard a client, and how the technology will impact their KPIs,” Kunal says.

Stepping up into the role of CTO also requires taking a step back, and having a helicopter view of the technological architecture of the business. Is the technology fulfilling its function? Are all the parts operating smoothly? Do my team have everything they need to do their jobs effectively?

“Step back and look at the bigger picture. You can’t just be sucked into the code, and thinking of repairing tiny features,” says Kimberley McCann, Engineering Lead at Reath. 

This obviously means stepping back from the small detail tasks that you might do as an engineer. It means knowing what to prioritise, and where best to focus your efforts. But it also means seeing the technology as part of something bigger, something which is helping the business succeed.

This is true for deciding on what you should be building. Richard Levy, CTO of Byway, highlights the ‘five whys’ method—constantly questioning ‘why’ allows you to interrogate exactly what the founding team wants to achieve, and to drill down into the best way to achieve that.

It’s also about questioning the CEO/founding team’s decisions, and, when it's appropriate, to say no.