🔗 When is a CTO not a CTO?

I’ve seen many discussions on LinkedIn and social media lately on whether a CTO should be hands-on. Opinions differ, but mine is pretty clear:

I’m going to set out my stall early: most early-stage startup CTO’s aren’t CTO’s. Most early-stage startups patently do not need a CTO.

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If your CTO writes production code, he probably isn’t a CTO. If your CTO directly manages developers, he most likely isn’t a CTO.

What companies at this sort of scale need, and frequently have, are strong Individual Contributors (“IC’s”), with a good feel for product, who can help teams self-organize and select the correct trade-offs to get to market/iterate after market entry.

But giving these individuals premature titles of CTO, Director/VP/Head of Engineering or similar is doing them a great disservice - if their comfort zone and zone of excellence is the intersection of IC, team & product, asking them to do the work of an actual CTO/Director/VP/Head later will at best make them miserable, at worst have them be awful at their job, when they used to be an outstanding IC & team multiplier.

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