article thumbnail

What does a Head of People do? Learning from Ada’s Chelsea MacDonald

Version One Ventures

And Sin-Mei Tsai , VP of Engineering at Shippo, discussed code quality. And she has just about completed 60 to 140 ( Ada is hiring !). Unlike “traditional” departments such as Engineering, Product, Sales, Marketing, BD, Customer Support/Success, People is a relatively new leadership function.

article thumbnail

What is a CTO?

Austin Startup

Even when someone is aware of what a CTO does, they often have limited context due to the wide variety of CTO roles. A CTO will guide your product strategy, market validation, architectural decisions, process optimization, recruiting, and hiring. A CTO’s real value is in finding opportunities with asymmetric payoffs.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: The hacker's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

Its common to find a hacker at the heart of almost any successful technology company. When I want to know about some concurrency issues between services in his cluster, he doesnt blink an eye when I suggest we get the source code and take a look. He throws off volumes of code, and it works. Just change it.

article thumbnail

Do Job Specs Matter?

Seeing Both Sides

Today's post is brought to you by my friend, Paul Blumenfeld , a recruiter who is one of the most thoughtful people I know when it comes to hiring processes. Many hiring managers write a job spec that is heavy on wishes and low on real needs. I see two reasons for this discrepancy: Static Specs. that would get the interview.

article thumbnail

Reincubate: Blog: Chief Technology Officer job description (for web, start-up or corporate)

www.reincubate.com

Start-ups often hire at one extreme -- closer to a Lead Developer or VP of Engineering -- whereas corporates may focus on their CIO, which is potentially quite a different role. Dan drew up his thoughts around a job description for a web Chief Technology Officer (or Chief Technical Officer), and invited us to follow suit.

article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: What does a startup CTO actually do?

Startup Lessons Learned

So I initially gravitated to the CTO title, and not VP of Engineering. It became harder and harder to separate how the software is built from how the software is structured. If youre trying to design an architecture to maximize agility, how can that work if some people are working in TDD and others not?

CTO 168
article thumbnail

Startup Advice: When to Use a Consulting CTO

rapidrollout.wordpress.com

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.&# If you find him, he’s gold, and not only because of his knowledge and experience.