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The terms “CTO&# and “VP Engineering&# have such stigmas associated with what they are that I’m sure some people will feel uncomfortable with the definitions I’ve put forward. I hope many will read this and have an answer for the question, “what’s the different between a CTO and a VP of Engineering?&#.
How does a newly hired Chief Technology Officer (CTO) find and grow the islands of innovation inside a large company? How not to waste your first six months as a new CTO thinking you’re making progress when the status quo is working to keep you at bay? But this is the first time he was the CTO of a company this size.
Using my StartupRoar as a radar, I came across a great post by Gabriel Weinberg Do you really need a full-timehire for that? Hiring seems to be the preferred use of seed funds (by investors and founders), whereas I'd prefer a focus on customer acquisition. The startup founder is definitely not ready to hire a CTO.
To customers, to investors, to press, to team members, to potential hires, to partners. Even if you’re the most technical CTO out there, you have to get comfortable with this reality. Hiring a recruiter doesn’t solve for this. As a cofounder you are *always* selling.
The second bullet, getting feedback from customers is most often not valid either. Even with these, you will have paper-tested your MVP, but the reality is that customers will not be able to assess the value to them until they actually use it. Structure development contracts appropriately or directing the in-house team appropriately.
The reason is that good attributes apply equally well to “external” partners, as they do to internal partners, like a co-founder or CTO. A good overall example is the synergy between Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, as well as long-time Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. Conflicting visions won’t work. Marty Zwilling.
Key Functions with High Impact Generative AI is revolutionizing sales by enabling dynamic pricing and personalized customer interactions, boosting conversion rates and customer satisfaction. Post-sale, AI analyzes customer data to improve service and loyalty, making it a cornerstone of modern sales methodologies.
But if you level up , raise capital and grow customers, revenue and staff – life changes. Eventually you need a VP of Product to handle your product roadmap, a CTO for engineering leadership and VPs of sales, marketing & biz dev. You hire great people. Do you hire more sales people? You set direction.
As your organization grows and you hire senior staff where you are no longer managing every employee directly the issue of how to manage people that are not your “direct&# reports arises. You’ll get sales information from your VP of Sales, marketing information from your VP Marketing, tech information from your CTO and so on.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, September 30, 2008 What does a startup CTO actually do? Often times, it seems like people are thinking its synonymous with "that guy who gets paid to sit in the corner and think technical deep thoughts" or "that guy who gets to swoop in a rearrange my project at the last minute on a whim."
The reason is that good attributes apply equally well to “external” partners, as they do to internal partners, like a co-founder or CTO. The passion has to be in the business context – meaning results oriented, customer oriented, and sensitive to competition. Partner decisions are more important than hiring decisions.
The second is that the retailers were constrained by their high costs of local real estate and service staff relative to the costs of centralized warehouses where goods could be stacked high, sorted by robots, managed by RFIDs and then shipped via overnight to eager, cost-conscious customers across the US. 10x the experience.
The reason is that good attributes apply equally well to “external” partners, as they do to internal partners, like a co-founder or CTO. The passion has to be in the business context – meaning results oriented, customer oriented, and sensitive to competition. Partner decisions are more important than hiring decisions.
The truth is you really don’t know how your teammates or your bosses will perform in good times and bad. You hire people who look good on paper. So one of the surest signs you’ve hired a leader is the willingness of his or her former team to re-assemble. After 6 months – you know. You REALLY know.
You’re sales person is getting blocked by the CTO who says she shouldn’t go above him but the CTO isn’t approving the deal. But “he didn’t have the budget to hire a developer until he had raised money!&#. Should she take a chance and potentially ruffle feathers? He looked stunned.
The reason is that good attributes apply equally well to “external” partners, as they do to internal partners, like a co-founder or CTO. The passion has to be in the business context – meaning results oriented, customer oriented, and sensitive to competition. Partner decisions are more important than hiring decisions.
Hiring the wrong person for key company positions can cost a business thousands — or tens of thousands — of dollars and man hours. This is especially true when it comes to tech companies hiring the wrong chief technology officer. Leadership Abilities Are A Must It’s natural to want a tech savvy and competent CTO.
The reason is that good attributes apply equally well to “external” partners, as they do to internal partners, like a co-founder or CTO. The passion has to be in the business context – meaning results oriented, customer oriented, and sensitive to competition. Partner decisions are more important than hiring decisions.
You love converting marketing requirements into 960-wide artwork, replete with whitespace, custom fonts. Customers don’t open their wallets based on your unit test coverage or whether you used Bodoni instead of Times New Roman on the home page. Have you talked to 50 potential customers? Here are two: 1.
The most common ones I see and salute are CEO, CFO, and CTO. This person may be an extraordinary communicator, who rallies employees, customers, and colleagues around the vivid future he sees. If your business is managing contracts and patents, it makes sense, but the CLO for most startups is LegalZoom on the Internet.
The reason is that good attributes apply equally well to “external” partners, as they do to internal partners, like a co-founder or CTO. A good overall example is the synergy between Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, as well as long-time Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. Conflicting visions won’t work. Marty Zwilling.
None of this was law, and nothing in writing required this; this was just how these firms did business to protect their large institutional customers who would buy the stock. This required a repeatable and scalable sales process, which required a professional sales staff and a product stable enough that customers wouldn’t return it.
The most common ones I see and salute are CEO, CFO, and CTO. This person may be an extraordinary communicator, who rallies employees, customers, and colleagues around the vivid future he sees. If your business is managing contracts and patents, it makes sense, but the CLO for most startups is LegalZoom on the Internet.
Some great posts from April 2010 that talk to me in terms of being a CTO at a Startup. Redeye VC , April 13, 2010 Startup Development - SoCal CTO , April 23, 2010 Want to Know the Difference Between a CTO and a VP Engineering? Ben Casnocha: The Blog , April 15, 2010 Everyone I spoke with loved the idea.
Because I am true to the hiring practices I preach, I wanted a strong exec who would “ punch above their weightclass ” by taking a job they hadn’t yet done but would hugely aspire to and thus work harder to out perform. I told him that this had been a big theme for me for some time. So there you have it.
The most common ones I see and salute are CEO, CFO, and CTO. This person may be an extraordinary communicator, who rallies employees, customers, and colleagues around the vivid future he sees. If your business is managing contracts and patents, it makes sense, but the CLO for most startups is LegalZoom on the Internet.
skip to main | skip to sidebar SoCal CTO Saturday, February 17, 2007 Finding Good Developers in Los Angeles? Im part of a CTO group that meets once a month to discuss various topics. He has twenty years’ experience as a CTO. He has been the CTO for several start-ups, most notably eHarmony.
A week or so ago, we launched the Key Hire Wire at First Round. You will initially spend majority of time personally working with individual accounts and coaching sales team. CTO, Modcloth – San Francisco, CA (corrected from e-mail version) Remember that girl from back home? How do you like them apples?
They often make great team members such as head of products, CTO, head of sales, CFO, etc. About 18 months ago in early 2008 we hired an analyst (pre-MBA), but wanted to wait until after Summer to hire a post-MBA associate. We weren’t ready to hire an associate yet so I offered him a summer internship. It was May.
Being relatively a new service trend in today’s tech-driven world, CTO-as-a-Service (CaaS) is notably gaining its momentum. Though CTO as a traditional full-time position exists for decades, some companies do not feel they need a technology executive. Ideal scenario assumes there’s a CTO in house. By referring to ?TO-as-a-Service
Much has been written about when it is time to hire a “professional CEO” to run a startup company and of course that has long been a norm in Silicon Valley when founders find that their inexperience may be a limiting factor in company growth ( know as the Peter Principle ). So the next chapter of DataSift is underway.
by Adam Root, founder and CTO of Hiplogiq. Most of us would want to hire the most experienced, cutthroat lawyer specializing in multimillion-dollar mergers. When I began developing the customer search engine SocialCentiv using Twitter, I envisioned the project as an add-on to our already popular SocialCompass. A DUI lawyer?
The reason is that good attributes apply equally well to “external” partners, as they do to internal partners, like a co-founder or CTO. The passion has to be in the business context – meaning results oriented, customer oriented, and sensitive to competition. Partner decisions are more important than hiring decisions.
A CTO will also want to ensure that the businesspeople on their team will understand important product and technical decisions. Remember the joke on Office Space where you can’t have the engineers talking to the customers? That the one guy’s job was just to interpret what the customers wanted for the engineers.
The most common ones I see and salute are CEO, CFO, and CTO. This person may be an extraordinary communicator, who rallies employees, customers, and colleagues around the vivid future he sees. If your business is managing contracts and patents, it makes sense, but the CLO for most startups is LegalZoom on the Internet.
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.
Of course, users won’t be able to customize their project as fully as if they were coding it from scratch. But in most cases, that level of customization isn’t necessary. In the past, a business that needed a custom app, website, or other digital solution would have to be prepared to make a big investment.
My daily life consists of (a) setting the strategy and rationale of the Engineering & Innovation department, based on a mixture of vision, data, and the needs of the rest of the company, (b) participate in doing the same for the whole company, (c) hire, (d) manage the managers whose teams execute the real work.
Want to Know Difference Between a CTO and a VP of Engineering? The terms “CTO” and “VP Engineering” have such stigmas associated with what they are that I’m sure some people will feel uncomfortable with the definitions I’ve put forward. I’ve heard both arguments from CTO’s.
The reason is that good attributes apply equally well to “external” partners, as they do to internal partners, like a co-founder or CTO. The passion has to be in the business context – meaning results oriented, customer oriented, and sensitive to competition. Partner decisions are more important than team member hiring decisions.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 Customer Development Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. Its a nice complement on the product engineering side to his customer development methodology.
Projecting from the seed stage, there are two types of team-building topics you want to address – key senior hires and org-level team building. As the company progresses through product market fit (PMF), you will want to highlight other key senior hires required to scale and round out the functional expertise of the exec team.
Great content again in September that meets at the intersection of startups, technology, product and being a Startup CTO. 8220; His three things (worth reading his whole post anyway) are set vision/strategy and communicate broadly, recruit/hire/retain top talent, and make sure there’s enough cash in the bank. It’s great advice.
Companies also use social networking sites in the hiring process, and increasingly, to do innovative advertising (such as the recent Jack in the Box campaign). He handles strategic partnerships and enterprise agreements with large corporate customers, as well as serving as the company's in-house general counsel. in Computer Science.
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