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

SoCal CTO

MAY 21, 2012

So, here goes: Dr. Tony Karrer Over the past 15 years, Tony has been a part-time CTO for more than 30 startups. Most notably, he was the original CTO for eHarmony for its first four years making him partly responsible for more than 4% of the marriages every year. What does it cost to acquire a new customer?

Fractional CTO 175

Fractional CTO CTO Hire Startup Social Network 175

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 14, 2009

There’s quite a bit of truth to what Mark is saying about startup software developers, but my guess is that there’s another reason that it seems harder to find developers in this context. So, likely quite a few of the people who were seeking startup developers were looking to find people for very low dollars.

Software Developers 150

Software Developers Software Development Software Developer 150

SoCal CTO

JULY 23, 2012

I seem to encounter a lot of people who want to attach a CTO label to me as I'm the only programmer on the founding team of three. While I do fill that role at the moment, I'm a little hesitant to refer to myself as a CTO as we still haven't launched a product, acquired a single user, or turned or a penny in profit. Accounting?

CTO Hire 231

CTO Hire Technical Review Developer Software Review 231

SoCal CTO

FEBRUARY 13, 2013

Leverage Existing Platforms or Third Party Products - you want to test your social network, grab Drupal and whip something together, or even just use a hosted service. WordPress - we spent quite a bit of time talking about how you could do a lot with WordPress to provide simple forms of lots of functionality.

Technical Cofounder 338

Technical Cofounder Technical Review CTO Hire Fractional CTO 338

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. I am heavily indebted to earlier theorists, and highly recommend the books Lean Thinking and Lean Software Development. The lean startup is an application of Lean Thinking. No more, no less.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

We wanted an agile approach that would allow us to build our software architecture as we needed it, without downtime, but also without large amounts of up-front cost. After all, the worst kind of waste in software development is code to support a use case that never materializes.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 94