This reminds me of how I have seen a few asks lately for roles where a company is looking for a CTO for their “AI startup”. How an “AI startup” (whatever that might actually mean) can _start up_ without a CTO is beyond me, and raises some very big red flags about what that company might be up to.
Mostly someone has a Phd and convinced people to give them money to 'change the world', then need someone who has actually built things beyond a script in a python notebook.
Gosh. So much this! The difference between the "average" PhD graduate in data science and the "average" software engineer with genuine experience delivering production software that people use at scale is quite something. I have nothing against data scientists, but in the same way that I wouldn't get a software engineer to build a complex model (above a certain level of complexity), neither would I get a data scientist to build a production app (above a certain level of scale). Both of these things are specialist activities that require a lot of experience, wisdom, and nuance to get right. Being good at one does not (necessarily) mean you will be good at the other.
It’s not necessarily a red flag. Sometimes the founder/CEO is technical and decides to solo it with hired engineers until not having a real CTO is a flight risk, or until they’re too busy to be contributing code anymore, or both.
That is fair, assuming the CEO is technical, or technical _enough_. However, I see a lot of non-tech CEOs trying this on and in those cases, it is a red flag for me.
There are a lot of "tech businesses" that are actually using pretty pedestrian tech. What they are _actually_ doing is business model innovation with an underlying tech platform. Often, that tech platform can be commodity or relatively simple tech. There are other startup propositions, though, where the tech _is_ the thing, and if you get the tech right, then some of those other things end up being secondary (not irrelevant, of course) just not primary. This is assuming that you really have punched a hole thru the door with some amazing deep tech breakthrough, which not every company is doing, contrary to what they may claim.
There is a YouTube video [0] (which goes back to 2019) that does a pretty good job of making this point. Well, much better than I can.
To be fair to your original point: you're right that marketing and sales are hard. I'm just adding the subtlety that there are some tech businesses where the tech is _also_ hard, and perhaps even harder.
I don't think we disagree. There are definitely deep tech businesses that are very hard to pull off.
My point is - asking "how did they do it without a CTO" is weird, they are hiring a CTO to do it, and they're bringing their business experience and funding - valuable stuff that a tech guy probably finds annoying. The number one suggestion on this forum is to sell before building and when somebody does it, users get wide eyes?
I guess it comes down to what "it" is. My sense (and this is just a personal orientation) is that if a CEO came to me and said, "Hey, I need a CTO for this new business I'm building", the very _next_ thing they say is really important.
If it is a) "Right, I've had this braingasm, and you need to build it, and for the privilege, you get 5% of the company!" versus b) "Right, I've had this idea, done some market validation, lined up our first 3 customers, and now we need to do some technical feasibility and put a team together to build this, and as CTO, I need a 50/50 founder, what do you say?" then I will pick b) over a) every time.
To be fair, those scenarios are cartoons on purpose, but I just wanted to make the point by highlighting the extreme cases.
As far as "sell before you build" goes, I think that really does depend on the problem you're solving. If it's a tech-powered business model innovation (where the tech is a commodity), then we are in 100% agreement. If the tech is a bit trickier and you need to show something special before funding (let alone clients), then I take a slightly different tack.
I'm not sure I get the last point about wide eyes, but I suspect it's immaterial to the bigger point.
Interesting... My initial reaction about the startup looking for a CTO was the same as yours. I was a founder and CTO, so it seems odd that you would not already have that in the mix... however I can see how there could be an idea, a market, a sales strategy, and a tech idea without the actual tech. In that case you would need to find a CTO to build that tech.
Of course the real gotcha is that there is no 'idea, market, sales strategy' that will be perfect, and the work is finding out where those ideas are wrong and fixing them. The lessons from my successes and failures says it is only worth doing that as a founder, because the failure risks are both high and unpredictable. Time is expensive, so spend it where there is both risk and reward, not just risk.
The most successful startups that haven't been founded by technical people I have seen usually didn't even have much of an idea - but they had customers and kept talking to them and created a product vision out of that. All startups should be doing that.
