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.

CTO 225

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 225

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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Fractional CTO CTO Hire CTO Technical Review 54

SoCal CTO

NOVEMBER 1, 2010

I had a recent email dialog with the founder of a company looking for a CTO for their startup. Did they really need a Startup CTO or Developer or both? And do I fit as a Part-Time CTO , Technology Advisor , CTO Founder , Acting CTO ? He had a partially built product.

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Technical Cofounder CTO Hire Equity Sweat Equity 241

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. Third party products are used appropriately.

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Technical Review CTO Hire Fractional CTO Software Review 332

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. I’ve heard both arguments from CTO’s. Raising Venture Capital. Angel Topics.

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Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE Fractional CTO CTO Hire 89

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. The same rule applies to product and app development. Do you want the product, or does your target market want the product? A DUI lawyer? Didn’t think so.

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Fractional CTO Product CTO Hire Merger 228

mashable.com

MAY 9, 2011

a New York-based sizzle reel production company specializing in promotional videos for PR and marketing professionals, and the Young Entrepreneur Council. Hiring the wrong person for key company positions can cost a business thousands — or tens of thousands — of dollars and man hours. Zach Cutler , The Cutler Group.

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CTO Hire Fractional CTO CTO Technical Review 73

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. And then there’s product management.

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CTO Hire Entrepreneur Technical Review Leadership 385

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 19, 2017

by Steve Owens, Founder and CTO of Finish Line Product Development Services. In this article we explore the unique challenges of a lean start-up and how Outsourced Product Development (OPD) can be used to overcome them. Reducing product turn time. Extending the runway. The Lean Start-Up Environment.

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Product Development Lean Developer Product 153

firstround.com

SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

Product and Engineering. How to Go From Google Engineer to First-Time CTO. Product and Engineering. How to Go From Google Engineer to First-Time CTO. Ian Langworth started his career as an O’Reilly author and software engineer at Google. First Round Capital.

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CTO Hire Engineer Software Review Part-Time VPE 52

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 2, 2020

Here’s why: because they take technology that used to be available to engineers only, and make it available to everyone. They’re still built that way by the product’s engineers. The point of no-code tools is to empower non-engineers to create. The no-code revolution has begun. How no-code tools work.

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CTO Hire eCommerce Engineer Software 264

View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 18, 2019

Now it’s time to discuss the “where”. As a seed-stage company, it is understandable to have a nascent (or non-existent) product and a barebone team relative to the great ambition of the company. Once you get to this part of the pitch, investors are trying to get a few things out of this slide: The “people roadmap”.

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Part-Time VPE Seed Stage CTO Hire Forecast 195

This is going to be BIG.

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

A week or so ago, we launched the Key Hire Wire at First Round. Because people live, shop, and buy in real time, Monetate products enable e-commerce web sites to market in real time. You will initially spend majority of time personally working with individual accounts and coaching sales team.

Part-Time VPE 92

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Engineer Sales 92

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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Technical Cofounder Southern California Search Engineer 150

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 26, 2020

He also said, “The most important hire I made in my time at the JAIC was the chief technology officer, Nand Mulchandani.” In this class session Nand Mulchandani, JAIC CTO who just completed an extended stint as Acting Director, continued the discussion of AI and the role of the JAIC. Nand Mulchandani. How the JAIC is Organized.

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Artificial Inteligence Fractional CTO Technology CTO 388

Version One Ventures

SEPTEMBER 25, 2018

But as the start-up scales and you hire employees, your day-to-day is taken over by more managerial tasks, like hiring and managing people, running company meetings, etc. It’s unusual to hire a non-founder CEO early in a start-up’s life because it will most likely fail. There’s typically little choice for a founder CEO.

Part-Time VPE 258

Part-Time VPE Management CTO Hire San Francisco 258

blog.aparttimecto.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

A Part-Time CTO Technology. One of the main challenges of starting a products based company is how do you build your product? This is especially true of web based companies, whose product consists of mainly a web site and very little more. In Plain English. Archive Jun 20th Sun In-House or Outsource?

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YoungUpstarts

AUGUST 18, 2020

They were bogged down by several-hundred-page compliance documents written in the eighties, they needed lawyers who took weeks to make small changes to contracts and they had timid executives that would sideline interesting projects with corporate politics. Small is the new big.

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Fractional CTO CTO Hire China Silicon Valley 147

Austin Startup

OCTOBER 29, 2020

Eynon has spent the majority of his career in the semiconductor industry, over 20 years of which in executive roles over the areas of R&D engineering, high volume manufacturing, marketing, and new business development. and for Baylor University’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department.

Technology 86

Technology CTO Hire Fractional CTO Austin 86

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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This is going to be BIG.

APRIL 13, 2022

I mean trusting what each one brings to the table—and being honest about the process of earning that trust and what it means to having a productive relationship. For example, if you’re a sales oriented founder that gets backed pre-launch, then an investor isn’t going to assume that founder has any product design skills.

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Founder Fiji CTO Hire Term Sheet 159

konamoxt.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

January 18, 2009 Why Your Startup Can’t Afford To Hire a CTO Before Founding Konamoxt, my last gig was the Chief Technology Officer for a local Seattle Startup. Mr. Startup CEO, I’m here to tell you, you can’t afford to hire a CTO. Can you help us make sure this candidate would make a good CTO?&#

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CTO Hire CTO Hiring Technical Review 40

konamoxt.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

January 21, 2009 Why Your Startup Can’t Afford To NOT Hire a CTO As I mentioned in my last post, one of the many things I do as an entrepreneur is to advise other start up companies. One of the common requests I get as an adviser is the help interview and vet potential CTO candidates.

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The Next Web

OCTOBER 7, 2013

“It kinda sucks to be engineer #1.”. That’s what a couple of my friends – engineers at Google and Bloomberg who have been following the rise of startup culture with intrigue – told me recently. They were referring to non-founder engineers, most commonly the first hire for technology businesses. Engineer #1?

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Engineer Dilution Option Pool Vesting 129

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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CTO Hire Web Cofounder Software Engineering 78

Austin Startup

AUGUST 19, 2018

Why Corporate Innovation Fails Design Sprints Done Right: Creating Lasting Change User-centered design is critical in making or breaking consumer technologies, but sometimes, on small product teams, day-to-day needs can get in the way of larger, longer term goals and solutions that resonate with your customer can’t manage to get off the launch pad.

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CTO Hire Fractional CTO Fractional VPE Austin 48

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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CTO Hire Cofounder San Francisco Silicon Valley 320

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 ). It now seems that Mark is more firmly in control.

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Founder CTO Hire Silicon Valley Leadership 309

crowdSPRING Blog

FEBRUARY 7, 2019

Files you need to collaborate on with others, sometimes across different time zones. And then there’s all of the critical information, like legal contracts and forms, you and your employees need to access. We are in a golden age for productivity apps. Gibbs was the founder of Google’s App Engine.

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Small Business Product CTO Hire Fractional CTO 55

SVPG

OCTOBER 14, 2014

The role of the product organization is to consistently deliver significant new value to the business through continuous product innovation. At a startup, the product team either innovates and provides real value or the startup dies. They just make minor optimizations to existing products.

Product 91

Product Technical Review Engineer CTO Hire 91

This is going to be BIG.

OCTOBER 10, 2010

A CTO will also want to ensure that the businesspeople on their team will understand important product and technical decisions. They want to work in an environment where their opinions are respected and they also feel like they can have intelligent discussions about product. This is where product and design leads come into play.

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Cofounder CTO Hire Design Founder 123

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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CTO Hire Retention Marketing Engineer 120

www.lanceglasser.com

MAY 13, 2012

A Model for Return on Engineering Expenses. Product development. Queuing theory and product development. A Model for Return on Engineering Expenses. The Essential Product Investigation Phase Gate. The Essential Product Investigation Phase Gate. So you want to ship the product early? Stock buybacks.

CTO 40

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2017

Twenty-five years ago, to go public you had to sell stuff – not just acquire users or have freemium products. People had to actually pay you for your product. This required a repeatable and scalable sales process, which required a professional sales staff and a product stable enough that customers wouldn’t return it.

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Founder Technical Review CTO Hire IPO 245

Venture Chronicles

AUGUST 2, 2013

I have covered a couple of topics in this series, the first being hiring the best people and the second organizing for success based on the attributes of the people you are hiring. 3) It all starts with the product: Companies can overcome a great many challenges with band-aids, duct tape, and bailing wire.

Product 62

Product CTO Hire Architecture Startup 62

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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Fractional CTO CTO CTO Hire Fractional VPE 40

SVPG

MARCH 5, 2011

If you take a look at the list of open product positions at the end of my recent newsletter, you’ll notice a record number of VP/Director of Product positions. In part this reflects the growth we are experiencing in our industry. Great product leaders are highly valued and often go on to found their own companies.

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Product CTO Hire Hiring Leadership 82