SoCal CTO

JANUARY 26, 2010

I’ve been having discussions with several people recently about the role of the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) in very early stage companies. In December 2007, I described how I commonly take on an Acting CTO Role in a Start-up. I used an image from Roger Smith that describes the varying roles of a CTO as the company matures.

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SoCal CTO

MARCH 3, 2011

I talk to roughly 2 or 3 new startups every week who need advice from an experienced CTO. Many of the founders of these companies are surprised to learn that I'm willing to review what they are doing (maybe an hour) and get on the phone for an hour with them and provide free advice. Of course, I provide part-time CTO services.

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SoCal CTO

NOVEMBER 1, 2010

I had a recent email dialog with the founder of a company looking for a CTO for their startup. And I tried to evaluate the idea and figure out: What did the founder really need here? Was it a Startup Founder Developer Gap ? Did they really need a Startup CTO or Developer or both? Was it a case of needing Homework?

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SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 10, 2012

I did a presentation recently for a graduate class from The Founder Institute around getting online/mobile products out the door. I LOVED it because, the presenting part was over quickly and we got into specific issues that the founders had in terms of getting things built. Would you create contracts without an attorney?

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Austin Startup

SEPTEMBER 18, 2017

As a CTO, I can definitely say without a doubt that few people understand what a CTO does. When I tell someone I’m a CTO, I’m often met with a blank stare. Even when someone is aware of what a CTO does, they often have limited context due to the wide variety of CTO roles.

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SoCal CTO

APRIL 18, 2012

Todd Gitlin of Safire Partners - a go to resource here in LA for recruiting C-level positions at startups - was nice enough to compile some data again this year (see last year's Startup CTO Salary and Equity Data ). Or they are looking at Hiring a CTO and want to see what salary and equity ranges look like. It has not.

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This is going to be BIG.

APRIL 13, 2022

Founders seem to get that. Don’t get me wrong—I don’t mean trust in the sense that VCs think founders are just going to get a fake passport and move to Fiji, or that investors are secretly plotting to take over the company. Maybe that would be helpful for a founder to share: “I’m excited to have you as part of this round.

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Duct Tape Marketing

JANUARY 19, 2024

Despite not going to university, Ash became a serial tech founder and the first marketing director of a unicorn startup – Just Eat). Kenneth Wenger – Unveiling the Future of AI Kenneth Wenger is an author, a research scholar at Toronto Metropolitan University, and CTO of Squint AI Inc. Click here to listen to the episode.

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Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 15, 2014

Much has been written about when it is time to hire a “professional CEO” to run a startup company and of course that has long been a norm in Silicon Valley when founders find that their inexperience may be a limiting factor in company growth ( know as the Peter Principle ).

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Version One Ventures

SEPTEMBER 25, 2018

A few weeks ago I shared some important leadership lessons from Stewart Butterfield , including investing in your own growth to make sure that the founder scales as fast as the company. Growing with your start-up can be a very tough undertaking for a founder. It requires reinventing yourself dramatically in very little time.

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SoCal CTO

SEPTEMBER 27, 2011

Founders vs. Early Employees To help with this discussion, let me start with a definition of "early employee." The first few people into a startup are on a spectrum of founder vs. early employee. Founders are likely not paid for a long time and have a sizeable equity percentage for early risk and having the concept.

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www.bothsidesofthetable.com

MAY 13, 2012

Want to Know Difference Between a CTO and a VP of Engineering? This time I thought I’d try and address engineering talent. Often I’m asked by startup CEO’s about how to best build an engineering team. This post is designed mostly for non-technical founders. Raising Venture Capital.

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mashable.com

MAY 9, 2011

Hiring the wrong person for key company positions can cost a business thousands — or tens of thousands — of dollars and man hours. This is especially true when it comes to tech companies hiring the wrong chief technology officer. Leadership Abilities Are A Must It’s natural to want a tech savvy and competent CTO.

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Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 16, 2014

Eventually you need a VP of Product to handle your product roadmap, a CTO for engineering leadership and VPs of sales, marketing & biz dev. You hire great people. You motivate, cajole, reassign tasks, hire, fire and push the organization forward. Engineering? You set direction. You course correct.

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SoCal CTO

MARCH 20, 2007

skip to main | skip to sidebar SoCal CTO Tuesday, March 20, 2007 Kevin Federline Search Engine Just saw a post - Sleep with a pop star, get your own branded search engine. He has twenty years’ experience as a CTO. He has been the CTO for several start-ups, most notably eHarmony. in Computer Science.

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View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 18, 2019

Projecting from the seed stage, there are two types of team-building topics you want to address – key senior hires and org-level team building. As the company progresses through product market fit (PMF), you will want to highlight other key senior hires required to scale and round out the functional expertise of the exec team.

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blog.aparttimecto.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

A Part-Time CTO Technology. Unless you’re fortunate to have one or more technical founders, you’ll quickly be faced with this simple question: Do we hack out a prototype somehow, find a developer or outsource the development? Delayed Commitment - You don’t need to worry about hiring on people too early.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, September 30, 2008 What does a startup CTO actually do? Often times, it seems like people are thinking its synonymous with "that guy who gets paid to sit in the corner and think technical deep thoughts" or "that guy who gets to swoop in a rearrange my project at the last minute on a whim."

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Version One Ventures

SEPTEMBER 15, 2021

Today we’re excited to share the official launch of Replay , a browser that records all of the context that developers and engineers need to fix bugs faster. Nothing that I programmed ever compiled perfectly the first time. The need for Replay is pretty obvious; every developer/engineer spends countless hours debugging their code.

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Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 21, 2014

The truth is you really don’t know how your teammates or your bosses will perform in good times and bad. You hire people who look good on paper. Which engineers dialed it in before a big release because it was during July 4th weekend? How about asking, “If we hired Susan could you imagine considering coming with her?”

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Austin Startup

AUGUST 19, 2018

Lightspeed Prototyping: A Collaborative Workflow Cultivating Conditions for Inclusion Many organizations view diversity challenges as a numbers game… just a matter of hiring and retaining enough talent to balance the equation. Cultivating Conditions For Inclusion What is a Fractional Executive (CTO, CMO, CFO)?

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This is going to be BIG.

OCTOBER 10, 2010

Every business person with a dollar and a dream these days thinks they’re a technical co-founder away from interweb stardom. A CTO will also want to ensure that the businesspeople on their team will understand important product and technical decisions. This is where product and design leads come into play. It just works.

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YoungUpstarts

MARCH 24, 2014

by Adam Root, founder and CTO of Hiplogiq. Most of us would want to hire the most experienced, cutthroat lawyer specializing in multimillion-dollar mergers. When I began developing the customer search engine SocialCentiv using Twitter, I envisioned the project as an add-on to our already popular SocialCompass.

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View from Seed

DECEMBER 3, 2015

This post on how to retain tech talent was written by Dan DeMeyere, director of engineering at thredUP. NextView is an investor in thredUP, and this post originally appeared on their engineering team blog. Retaining engineering talent has become an increasingly challenging task for any engineering manager in the Bay Area.

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rapidrollout.wordpress.com

JANUARY 15, 2011

Web Startup Lessons Advice from a CTO and Entrepreneur Home About Startup Advice: When to Use a Consulting CTO There are not many to be found. He or she might call himself a “consulting CTO,&# “freelance CTO,&# “on-demand CTO,&# “CTO on call,&# “CTO for hire,&# or just a “technology strategy advisor.&#

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Both Sides of the Table

MAY 7, 2013

Our industry just took one big step towards legitimacy with the hiring of renowned media exec Ynon Kreiz to run Maker Studios. This followed an investment late last year by Time Warner in the company in a round totaling $36 million , led by Rachel Lam , head of their investment group. Mr. T (DeStorm) vs. Mr. Rogers.

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www.informationarbitrage.com

FEBRUARY 24, 2010

Main February 23, 2010 Advice for CTO Founders: Dont Let Business Kill the Business Founding a technology company is an amazing thing. Too often, however, I have found CTO / Founders paired with business people who not only don't add value, but frequently detract from the value of the business.

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www.huffingtonpost.com

MAY 10, 2011

However, we needed a head of engineering to recruit and lead a larger team to accomplish our larger goals. Ive occasionally worked with executive recruiters, for example in hiring a CTO for my first company, Eve.com. This time, I decided to handle the process myself.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 1, 2014

For example: Mitch Kapor was a founder of Lotus. He’s a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, which has backed Facebook, Skype, Jawbone, and dozens of other companies whose products you use. He was a very early employee of Facebook , and engineering director there through the moment it blew up. Eric Ries will interview him.

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www.allthingsdistributed.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

Main July 11, 2007 The Different CTO Roles I was putting together a short panel presentation on the roleof a Chief Technology Officer in corporate innovation and I once again realized that there is quite a bit of confusion around the role of the CTO. The first CTOs came onto the scene during the late eighties.A

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Both Sides of the Table

JULY 1, 2010

As your organization grows and you hire senior staff where you are no longer managing every employee directly the issue of how to manage people that are not your “direct&# reports arises. This applies to both founders and to VC’s that work with them. I see two common mistakes in companies (not just in startups, in fact).

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Hunter Walker

JUNE 7, 2014

Hiring Has Changed: Before the press was a way of generating interest for hiring. Founders are building small, focused teams based on people they worked with previously and referrals from their networks. And search engines like sourcing.io help you build a specific list based on skills you’re seeking.

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SoCal CTO

FEBRUARY 17, 2007

skip to main | skip to sidebar SoCal CTO Saturday, February 17, 2007 Finding Good Developers in Los Angeles? Im part of a CTO group that meets once a month to discuss various topics. He has twenty years’ experience as a CTO. He has been the CTO for several start-ups, most notably eHarmony.

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devver.wordpress.com

NOVEMBER 9, 2010

Boulder CTO December Lunch with Tim Wolters with 5 comments The Boulder CTO Lunch meets once a month with a guest speaker and covers topics and questions that startup CTOs should find interesting. The Role As a CTO, you paint a landscape of the product and market. There are two kinds of CTOs: tactical and visionary.

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Both Sides of the Table

MAY 27, 2013

In this period (less than 2 years) he has brought on incredibly talented senior execs is sales, marketing, product management, client services, finance, vp engineering and more. In his spare time he raised nearly $30 million. It consists of a highly intelligent and opinionated founder – Nick Halstead. Always seek input.

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Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 17, 2011

One great solution I see is to hire an outstanding CFO who runs both. “We’re all equal co-founders and we don’t care about titles.&# Still, I’ll bet that functionally you divide areas of competence like sales & marketing, product, engineering, biz dev, etc. .&# But they aren’t the COO.

Operations 292

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Austin Startup

DECEMBER 16, 2018

It is all about how you hire the best and the amazing impact doing so will have on your culture. You must test those that you want to hire. I didn’t know better at the time and they were much older and “experienced” than I was, so I let them run with that plan. But they were wrong 50% of the time, six months later.

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