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What is a CTO?

Austin Startup

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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Hiring Developers Before Product/Market Fit?

SoCal CTO

Hiring seems to be the preferred use of seed funds (by investors and founders), whereas I'd prefer a focus on customer acquisition. And that should be the focus of the founders -- to find the special fit that will make your company take off. The startup founder is definitely not ready to hire a CTO. Far from it.

CTO Hire 205
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See More than 120 Speakers and Mentors at The Lean Startup Conference

Startup Lessons Learned

For example: Mitch Kapor was a founder of Lotus. As the emeritus Chief Technology Officer of the United States, he still connects government and Silicon Valley. He’s a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, which has backed Facebook, Skype, Jawbone, and dozens of other companies whose products you use.

Lean 165
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Open Source Business Model

SoCal CTO

Common revenue streams are consulting, training, support, customization, upgraded versions for corporate applications, etc. He has twenty years’ experience as a CTO. He has been the CTO for several start-ups, most notably eHarmony. ► February (2) CTO Founders / Cofounders Part-Time Startup CTO?

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Product Launches: 5 Unexpected Lessons from the Real World

ConversionXL

Amazon’s Chief Technology Officer, Werner Vogels, summarizes the purpose of the press release: “Writing a press release up front clarifies how the world will see the product – not just how we think about it internally.”. Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré , a B2B SaaS consultant, lamented that. Cheap acquisition is (too) cheap.

Product 110
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Building Your MVP as a Non-Technical Founder

SoCal CTO

I did a presentation this week at Coloft that looked at how Non-Technical Founders can go about getting their MVP built. And the back-end is something that a non-technical founder can manage. Equity-Only CTO and Equity-Only Developers Technology Roles in Startups Want to Know the Difference Between a CTO and a VP Engineering?

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Lessons Learned: The three drivers of growth for your business.

Startup Lessons Learned

is an elegant way to model any service-oriented business: Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue We used a very similar scheme at IMVU, although we werent lucky enough to have started with this framework, and so had to derive a lot of it ourselves via trial and error. The AARRR model (hence pirates, get it?)