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Four Things I Wish I Knew as the New CTO of a Startup

Isabel Nyo on September 29, 2020

When I first became a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of a startup, I was young and inexperienced. I was technically capable, had led multiple softw...
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Riju Pramanik

I remember my first dev job turned into de facto CTO role because no one else in the company knew about tech. I was barely 18 at the time and I hated it. I quit within 3 months and all the points you made really resonated!
Hope you have nice day!

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Rituraj Borpujari

Nice insights put in an interesting way.

Insights two and four, about understanding beyond functional skills and integrating into a process are two things I am working on recently.

If you are that CTO now, how would you approach the different roles that you needed to play at that startup?

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Isabel Nyo

Thanks! I am no longer working as CTO of a startup, I am now working as a senior engineering manager at an enterprise software company. If you're interested, you can read more about a day in my life these days: eisabainyo.net/weblog/2020/09/03/a...

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konung • Edited

Great insight!
I come from a non-startup background but my experience is different, yet the same. I've been a CTO of an established medium-size business for about 12 years and came on-board with the background of a senior developer, like you.

Our IT team is small because IT is not our core product. We are a manufacturing company, and the role of IT is to support manufacturing, through internal IT, network support, DevOps, and internal software products.

I find that I've been a hands-on CTO in the same way as you were for a long time. I wish you published your post sooner :) Your insight #2 hits very close - My biggest problem was for a longest time, an inability to let go of system or infrastructure, especially the one that I built, once I hired a capable team member. Also, the feeling that I need to know as much if nor more about each and every system my team works on so that I can be their technical resource, got in the way. Took me a while to realize, that a "bonus feature" of a CTO, not a hard requirement. The main job of a CTO is to provide vision & strategy, project management, support, resources, and organizational help to the team. Functional expertise in 1-2 fields is necessary, but it can't get in the way, of the actual job.

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Zach Biles

Im also interested in more specific details on what you'd do differently. I'm currently in this same position and trying to navigate these same waters.

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Isabel Nyo

Hi Zach! I am no longer working as CTO of a startup, I am now working as a senior engineering manager at an enterprise software company. If you're interested, you can read more about a day in my life these days: eisabainyo.net/weblog/2020/09/03/a...

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kethmars

Thank you for a nice and thorough article.

I started to wonder how much more valuable it makes a developer who also understands and actually embraces the points you brought out :).

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Isabel Nyo

Definitely, I used to be a developer who only cared about the beautiful code. I wrote an article about how to be an exceptional developer by caring more than just code. I will share it here on dev.to when I have a chance to syndicate some of my old content soon.

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Devendra

True some of thisgs are just a reflection of me couple of years ago... Learnt through my mistakes and I believe kept my patience. But moral of the story should be "one should be happy in whatever they are doing"

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Max Ong Zong Bao

Really awesome article I think the hardest part is delegation is your from a IC role and to focus on the strategy plus the vision to make it work.

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Neurabot

Good. Nice.

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Brian Christner

Great read, thanks for this!

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Bea Oliveira

Hi! Thanks for sharing, I really enjoyed reading it 👏 👏 👏