The Startup CTO Handbook — How to manage technical change as a CTO

7 Essential Lessons for New Tech Leaders Scaling Their First Business

Image Credit — LOGAN WEAVER on Unsplash

Key takeaway — “Know what you’re building, where you’re going and implement processes to help you get there”

No matter where you are in your journey as a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) — joining a high-growth tech startup levels out your experience. Unless you’ve worked in a startup environment before, you will be exposed to a whole new set of challenges that your previous corporate experience will not have prepared you for.

Why am I telling you this?

Firstly, let me introduce myself - I’m Bhairav Patel, founder of Atom CTO, a company that works with early-stage startups and small businesses.

I started my career as a tech consultant at one of the Big Four accounting firms before becoming a freelance consultant and then switching to the other side of the table to become the CTO for a scale-up. After a number of years there, I decided to step back into the fire and was hired as the first employee of a startup that had just received considerable funding.

I remember my first day as a startup CTO like it was yesterday. I had no team, some tech that was built by another company and about 20 people in three different countries all looking to start work. I will never forget learning how to network and patch servers and help reset passwords whilst building a team to support a cloud platform that going to fund millions of dollars worth of assets.

Just weeks before, I was in a different job, one that I’d been in for 5 years, where I’d built a solid team. To be honest, I did very little besides manage them and sit in meetings. I wasn’t unprepared for my new job, but it was a long time since I got my hands dirty at the lowest level.

I look back on those days with great pride. Not simply because that business became very successful but mostly because, by the end of it, I built an amazing team. A team that I still work with today, but this time in our own venture. One that helps other companies get their tech off the ground faster.

The lessons you will read in this blog mirror that journey I took all those years ago and have been compounded by decades of working with startups of all sizes, shapes and industries. Hopefully, they will lift the curtain on the life of a startup CTO and prepare you for the hurdles ahead.

Get to the point — what are the lessons?

1. Embrace the Startup Mindset — In this lesson, we’ll explore what mental processes you’ll need to change in order to adapt to working in a startup
2. Know what you’re building — It sounds obvious but, when you work in a startup, you’ll soon realise that there are a hundred different ideas floating around. If you don’t know what you’re building, you’ll end up with nonsense.
3. Know where you’re going — If you don’t know where you’re headed, you won’t know how to get there or worse, you may never get there. Again, it seems simple but too often people lose sight of their purpose as they grow.
4. Implement a Product Development Process — Customers always come first, otherwise, it’s just a hobby. You need to make sure that your development process keeps the customer in mind. You’re building for your customers, not for yourself.
5. Build IT processes that fit your business — If you left your old job to become a startup CTO to untangle yourself from rules and processes… well, I have bad news for you. Those rules and processes were there for a reason. Now, you’ll be responsible for building your own.
6. Understand your key scaling risks — Risk is inherent in all parts of a business. If you can’t identify, measure and monitor them, you will suffer the consequences.
7. Nurture your team culture — Even though I was a one-man IT band for a short while, it was pretty clear that I couldn’t run a multi-million dollar startup alone. You need to build a team but, most importantly, you need to learn how to lead them and foster the right culture.

I hope you have as much fun reading the lessons as I did writing them. They are not meant to be a definitive, “know it all” account of being a startup CTO. They are intended to serve as a guide for the future and, perhaps, highlight things you have yet to consider…

Lesson #1 — Embrace the Startup Mindset

Joining a startup as a CTO exposes you to challenges unlike any other role because, essentially, you are IT. Before diving into a startup, adopting a “startup mindset” is advisable. Your world will shift on a daily basis and your attitude needs to change too.

“The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change their future by merely changing their attitude” — Oprah Winfrey.

These points may not apply to everyone, but they are worth considering:

• Imposter Syndrome — We all have it, no matter how many years you’ve been in the tech industry. People are going to look to you to make decisions or have opinions on a wide range of topics. Worst of all, people are going to be expecting you to know every trend within your tech space. Essentially, you’ll need to learn everything about your business or domain.
• Shares as Payment — As an early employee, you might be tempted to demand a large % of shares/equity as payment for your work. However, as the company successfully raises more funding, your shares will ultimately be diluted. A good CEO / founder will tie your remuneration package to the quality of your work and ultimately how the startup progresses (e.g. milestone vesting). Also, shares are not a substitute for wages. Of course, startups aren’t always flush with cash but if vendors and suppliers are getting paid, then there is no reason you shouldn’t too. You should be paid what is fair, based on the financial resources of the business.
• There is No Comfort Zone — Do you plan on remaining a hands-on engineering CTO? Do you want to avoid client or investor conversations? Well, that’s not quite how a startup works. Understandably, your investors and big clients will want to know who they are doing business with and expect to meet with the CTO. As such, expect to do things that you aren’t fully comfortable with, but be careful not to push your limits too far.
• There is no Budget — There is no “right” budget for a startup, the right budget is the amount of money you have available. This will be a shock if you come from a “big tech” or a well-funded industry that throws a lot of money at engineering. Be aware that, even if you raise tens of millions, only a small proportion of that will be for your team. So, focus your expenditure on activities that will drive the business forward.
• Chasing Perfection — You do not have the time to make your pipelines, documentation, and code look neat or pretty. Sure, this is really important when you have a large team, however, your startup will have a limited budget and short deadlines. So, do the bare minimum and then iterate on it until you reach the value inflexion point.
• Learn about your Business — If you were part of a large company, you probably weren’t exposed to the full end-to-end business picture. You may be used to dedicated departments but, as a startup CTO, you are the supplier relations and recruitment team. You will need to learn how you are going to make money, handle finances, negotiate deals and report to investors. Prepare to broaden your horizons — you never know, you might even enjoy dealing with accountants!
• Leverage your Network — When you join a startup, you have limited resources in terms of time, money and people. So, you need to make the best of what you have available. As such, you need to combine your knowledge with your network to maximise value. One of your contacts will know someone who knows someone who can solve your problem.
• Surround yourself with Mentors — If you’re a younger CTO, find a mentor who you respect to guide you on your journey. If you’re a more established CTO, reach out to your contacts — you’ll be surprised how many people are willing to help you (even if you’re a small business)! If you have a good reputation, people will most certainly be interested in what you’re doing and won’t be concerned about the size of the business. They’ll assume you’re building a startup for a reason and that with you there, there’s probably a good chance it will get somewhere.

As I mentioned in the introduction, I remember the days when I had to relearn how to patch servers. If you saw how the cabling was connected, you’d have thought a toddler did it!

Jokes aside, going back to basics helped me reinforce some of the core fundamentals of tech. It helped me realise that, in previous companies, I hadn’t implemented things most optimally. I wasn’t aware of the newest trends or best practices because I wasn’t so hands-on.

Don’t let your ego get in the way.

During this initial phase of a startup you will learn a lot, so be open to change and don’t be afraid to seek advice. Most importantly, don’t let your ego get in the way — startups are one giant learning curve!

Recommended reading: Zero to One (Peter Thiel) and Shoe Dog (Phil Knight)

Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash

Lesson #2 — Know what you’re building

Hurray! You’ve just been hired as the CTO of a budding startup. You’ve signed the contract, been given tons of equity and soon you’ll be on your path to making billions. Or, perhaps, this is your baby — you’ve had a great idea and you can’t wait to start a business. Maybe you’re a technical co-founder. No matter how you got the job, what everyone wants to know is… What are you going to build? ⚒️

As the startup CTO, you’ll have a lot of pressure from investors, the management team and employees to define a roadmap, forecast timescales and estimate costs. You will often get asked; Why hasn’t it been built yet? What’s taking so long? What do you mean you need more budget? This isn’t what I asked for, I wanted something else!

As the early-stage CTO your main job will be to say No.

As the early-stage CTO your main job will be to say “No”. You need to bring your sales team back down to earth and tactfully encourage your CEO to stop using terms such as “cutting-edge AI”. Your job is to get a product out to the market as quickly as possible and ensure that it’s what customers want. Read the Tech Startup Machine to learn more.

Unfortunately, most startups lack a clear product vision or any form of product management. They generally have a high-level notion of what they want to do but are often light on the details. More concerningly, they rarely think about the “non-happy” paths i.e. What are the deviations from a process that could impact a user’s journey?

“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late” — Reid Hoffman.

Without a clear product vision that is aligned across the business — you will inevitably end up selling and building different things. So, you need to continually ask yourself — What are we building?

Practical Tips:

• Focus on Benefits, not Features — Your job is to build a product that customers want to use and spend money on. However, you cannot do it alone. Your commercial and product teams must define each function and process that the user would need. You can provide guidance or make suggestions but every feature must be beneficial to your customer. Encourage your team to test their assumptions with user groups before you begin building in earnest — it will save you a lot of pain.
• Pick a Stable Tech Stack — From a technical perspective, your job is to choose the right tech stack so you can hire additional developers easily when you start to scale. You don’t need to be fancy — pick a stack that allows you to quickly find someone to replace you (if you’re writing all the code). Ultimately, you need to make sure that your live products are stable, easy to maintain and fully monitored to fix any issues quickly.
• Using the Latest Tech is Risky — Your CEO may want you to speak to investor meetings about how “sexy” your tech is. However, avoid integrating the latest and greatest tech into your product if you know it isn’t a good fit, expensive, complicated, difficult to maintain or find engineers to program.
• Know your Limits — You may be a fantastic mobile developer but you don’t have the first clue about back-end architecture. Work to your strengths, not your weaknesses. When you have skill gaps, find someone to fill them. Of course, you can spend the time learning a new language or framework but Do you have the time? Or, more importantly, do you want to learn a new language?
• Ask for Help — If your budget is limited and you can’t hire specialist skills — you will need to learn it for yourself. Use your network to help you. Whether that’s code reviews, setting up organisational structures, architectural advice or whatever you need to get your project over the finish line.
• As long as it works — Your success will be measured by your ability to get to market with a product that works and generates revenue. Under the hood, your code doesn’t need to look pretty (as long as it’s readable). If you’ve taken shortcuts, document your technical debt so you know what problems you’ll face later on.
• Stable, Controlled Changes — If your hypothesis is right, the market will validate your product and your value will increase. To sustain this trajectory, you need to be able to deploy changes to the platform quickly, in a controlled manner and without breaking what is already there.

Common Tech Startup Questions:

Do you need a technical co-founder or a development agency/engineer to build your product?

This depends on your level of technical skill and the complexity of your idea. Ask yourself; What can you do yourself? Do you need someone who shares your vision? Are you willing to share control? If you have enough money, you can use a development agency in the short term for low to medium-complexity projects — however, this is not scalable or efficient as you grow. Set yourself clear milestones based on deliverables and work backwards from there.

When should you hire a full-time software development team?

This depends on how fast you want to build and how much money you want to spend. If you have enough capital, you can hire a team of engineers within a few months and have a shiny product ready within a year. If you don’t have access to piles of cash, you can either do it yourself or partner with other engineers. Therefore, the question becomes; How long are you going to invest your time? And, how much control do you want?

Recommended Reading: Obviously Awesome (April Dunford) and Disciplined Entrepreneurship (Bill Aulet)

Image Credit — Randy Fath on Unsplash

Lesson #3 — Know where you’re going

Congrats — you’ve launched your product/service to market, kudos to you! Now comes the hard part — continuously reacting to your customer and market demands. Yes, you’ll have to change what you’ve spent the last few months sweating over…

“If you don’t know where you’ve come from, you don’t know where you’re going” — Maya Angelou

It’s tempting to relax after your product launch. Customers may buy your product but they will inevitably ask for small changes or improvements. You want to appease your newly found, hard-won customers — so you may react quickly to every small request and end up running around like a headless chicken 🐔

Do not build for a single customer.

This is the time to keep calm and start building processes, structure and develop strategies within your tech team. You can’t build everything all at once and not all requests are equally important. That’s when your product and operations managers truly shine (see Lesson #4) ✨

Actionable Advice — How do you know where to go?

• Hire a Product Manager early — They will curate a solid long-term product vision, prioritise what features to build and cut out the rest. At the very least, they will analyse customer feedback to determine what features are essential for mass adoption and what is “nice to have”. Great PMs are truly hard to find but they are essential to your success.
• Consider your growth opportunities — One big mistake that startups make is limiting their product to one niche use case. Of course, you need a beachhead market or initial target customer at the beginning of your journey but that can’t be the end game. Inevitably, as your market saturates, you will need to find new pastures to graze your cash cow. If your product is hard coded for one customer segment, it will be difficult to expand and expensive to change.
• Do not build for a single customer — Every business is different, they all run differently and have a slightly different focus. This is why there isn’t just one supermarket, search engine or car manufacturer. However, if you customise your product perfectly for your biggest customer, you may end up building an internal tool just for them and not the addressable market. Search for the commonalities and build configuration into your product or risk being boxed into one client’s requirements.
• Identify the gaps in your team — Are you missing a critical function in your business? Are there gaps in your team’s knowledge? This could be fundraising, data science, regulatory or even product-specific. Once you have identified these areas — begin pulling together a hiring plan based on milestones to get you there. Recruiting top talent always takes longer than you think.

Recommended Reading: Blitzscaling (Reed Hoffman and Chris Yeh) + The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (Eric Jorgenson, Tim Ferriss)

Image credit — Jordan Ladikos on Unsplash

Lesson #4 — Implement a Product Development Process

“If the technology doesn’t serve your business objective, then you shouldn’t be doing it.” — Frank Oelschlager (Ten Mile Square)

How do you know if the features you’re building are the right ones?

Honestly, there is no 100% guarantee that your features will work. However, if you test your ideas with real customers and ask for feedback — you can iterate before investing heavily in major changes. As a CTO, you are going to say “no” more than you say “yes” to building stuff. You have a finite budget, a team with a fixed capacity and not a lot of time to get things right. You have to prioritise the things that benefit the business — increasing revenue or reducing costs. Therefore, you need a process to determine what to build (listen to the Frank Oelschlager podcast here).

Don’t just do each thing that your customers ask for — the list may be endless. Categorise the requests and find trends instead.

What does a product development process look like?

Start with a simple list, stick to it and slowly tweak it over time as you grow. It would help if you were pretty certain that the features you bring to market are what your customers want.

• Get the feedback from your customers — compile it, analyse it and make it accessible to your team. Don’t just do each thing that your customers ask for — the list may be endless. Categorise the requests and find trends instead.
• Align customer requests with your product vision — If your customer requests fit your product vision, add them to the backlog. If they don’t, then ask yourself why. Is it a custom thing? Or, is it just something you don’t want to do? Will your customer pay for the changes (or features)?
• Evaluate the impact of the request or new feature — How will it impact existing customers? Will it disrupt current customers or make things easier for them? Generally, if it’s a low-impact positive change, it’s a no-brainer. If not, take a second to evaluate the consequences.
• What is your Return On Investment (ROI)? Will your changes impact the top (revenue) or bottom line (profit)? Will they bring in more customers, convert existing customers to a higher tier or reduce internal costs? All of these are good things to consider and prioritise according to your growth strategy.
• Verify your assumptions — Once the change has been rolled out, figure out whether your customers are satisfied. If not, tweak your process until you get feedback earlier in the development and testing loop. Ask clearer questions, build prototypes and validate that value exists with real customers ASAP.

Of course, all of the above sounds very simple and straightforward but it’s easy to forget about everything whilst you’re scaling at hyper speed (and everything is falling apart). As a CTO, you are the last line of defence for the business — you need to make sure that your team is focused on creating value for the customer.

Recommended reading: That Will Never Work (Mark Randolph) + The Mom Test (Rob Fitzpatrick)

Image credit — NEW DATA SERVICES on Unsplash

Lesson #5 — Build IT processes that fit your business

Your newly minted development and change management processes are now in place and sales are growing. However, as you hire new people and begin to integrate them into your company, things don’t always go as planned… Your systems were only built for 5 people and now you have nearly 50!

“Scaling requires the courage to lose the startup mentality, take on procedures you used to mock, and start operating like a company.” — Geoffrey Moore

Your technical (IT) and software operations need to evolve as your team does. You need to create IT and software development processes that change to fit your needs. They need to work seamlessly to keep everyone aligned around a common goal. Otherwise, you might end up doing 10 different things poorly and burning out.

The IT Checklist — What processes should you build?

• Settle on your Software Development methodology — There are tons of different methodologies to choose from (Agile, Waterfall, DevOps etc.) — Pick a preferred path from feature request to production release that works for you and explain it to the business. The end goal is to create cadence to your delivery so you’re not constantly hot-fixing the whole time.
• Label and Document your Technical Debt — Everyone incurs debt from short-term choices in the long run. You will inevitably cut corners when building your MVP or during your first hyper-growth phase. Document what you did, where you did it and add some clean-up (chore) time to your development methodology (i.e. a few capacity/story points).
• TEST, for god’s sake, TEST! If you developed your product at lightning speed, your unit tests probably went out the window a few months before launch. Get on top of them as soon as possible — you need a reliable codebase as you scale.
• Put some Documentation in place! Yes, documentation can seem pointless when everything is changing rapidly but it’s crucial in the long run. Document what you have at the time, incrementally improve it and make it someone’s responsibility to update it. There are countless tools out there that can help you (Confluence, Notion etc.) — choose one and get started. Keep it simple, just describe what and how things work.
• Assign clear Roles and Responsibilities — As your team expands, you’ll need to define what each person does and does not do. You want to be clear about what each person is responsible for and close any gaps. Once each engineer has a clear focus, you can move at hyper speed without falling over each other.
• Schedule regular Business Meetings — As a CTO, you should have regular meetings with the C-suite (CEO, COO etc.) to understand the business objectives and plan your technical roadmap. Software development always takes longer than you think — so, understanding what is coming up will help your team prepare.

The advice above will help you develop a structure that enables a cadence and quality of delivery. This will give you peace of mind that your systems are under control and well documented, making fundraising due diligence and partnership creation a piece of cake (everyone loves a clean data room)!

Recommended Reading: Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less (Greg McKeown) and Principles (Ray Dalio)

Image Credit — Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Lesson #6 — Understand your key scaling risks

Congratulations! Your company is still alive and kicking. You’ve launched, acquired some customers, set up scalable processes and raised some money. You’re probably feeling like the best CTO ever. It’s as if nothing can stand in your way… That is until you truly begin scaling your operations.

“Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.” — Warren Buffett

As your business grows in size and complexity, you need to take a deeper look at your operations. What is stopping you from moving forward? What will get you to your next inflexion point (e.g. from 1k to 100k customers)?

From experience, the following areas need to be addressed:

• Decision-Making (delegation)
• Information Systems (internal software tools)
• Security and Data Protection
• Business Continuity
• Policies, Procedures and Governance
• Budget Allocation
• Team Culture (This deserves its own section in Lesson #7)

Unfortunately, not all CTOs get this far because most engineers prefer the building and launching part. Very few enjoy doing the less hands-on stuff “administrative stuff”. If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve probably realised that you are the bottleneck to most things in the tech team and the only one who can fix them.

Decision-Making (How do you un-bottleneck yourself?)

If you’ve followed the advice in Lesson #5, you’ll have good documentation, clear roles and software development functions. This will allow other team members to grow into their roles and take some of the technical, day-to-day tasks away from you. The next step is to build more communication and planning structures. This will ensure that everyone knows what they should be doing as you establish more layers within your team.

Information Systems (Where is all your data?)

When you started the company, there were only a few people. You all knew what you were doing and people just signed up for whatever software they needed to get the job done. If that’s the case, then you probably have company data all over the place. As the CTO, it’s your job to know where your data is, how much it costs to store, how it’s maintained and who owns it.

As the CTO, it’s your job to know where your data is, how much it costs to store, how it’s maintained and who owns it.

You need to review your internal tech landscape and decide whether what you have today is right for your future growth. The product you built is easy enough to manage but the internal mess of disparate, disconnected and decentralised systems (owned by different departments) is really going to hurt later down the line…

You don’t need to own all the systems, but you will need to maintain them. For example, customer-facing websites can be owned by the marketing team but they will want your help when things go wrong. You’ll need to know which host provider they are using, who has admin access rights and whether they have suitable security controls in place.

Security and Data Protection (How do we protect ourselves?)

Security permeates all areas of your organisation from your customer-facing product to your email service. If you don’t take security seriously, you’re not serious about your business. All it takes is one data breach or cyber attack to bring down your entire operation or worse, your company.

If you don’t take security seriously, you’re not serious about your business.

Make sure you have the basics in place including; multi-factor authentication, access controls, auto-updates, device management and data loss prevention. As in life, the greatest risk is doing nothing.

Business Continuity (How do you reduce unwanted downtime?)

Once things are running smoothly, you want them to continue doing so. To protect the business against downtime, you need to implement a business continuity and disaster recovery program. This may seem like an unnecessary complexity, however, you don’t want to lose any of your precious paying customers or development progress.

If you don’t know about it, you can’t protect it and you definitely can’t plan around it.

In the early days, you could quickly and easily redeploy code and avoid the hassle. This cowboy approach doesn’t work when your systems become more complex and the business begins setting SLAs for uptimes, time to recovery and data integrity (i.e. backups). If you don’t know about it, you can’t protect it and you definitely can’t plan around it.

Policies, Procedures and Governance (How do we maintain quality?)

Another feature of becoming an adult-sized business is the paperwork. You’ll have to write policies, procedures and governance functions around security, on-boarding and off-boarding of employees, BYOD and more. All of the really boring yet super important things. This is where a lot of CTOs give up and go home. This kind of documentation is not for everyone but there are many resources that can help you (if you want it).

If you don’t have these policies in place, it makes people and quality management much more difficult. As your company grows, people are going to ask questions. You want to point them to an internal document that provides a clear, standardised answer to each question. Additionally, this helps you comply with GDPR and industry-specific organisations such as the FCA.

Budget Allocation (How should you allocate capital?)

Budgets are never perfect. Sometimes you forget to put something in or underestimate a line item. It happens and, over time, you’ll get better at predicting your costs. However, you need to be cognizant of the ROI for the business (see Lesson #4). For example, if your annual turnover is $2 million and you ask for a $1 million tech budget, you need to show how this figure will drive growth. Set clear objectives with your budget — $X million will achieve a Y% increase in revenue or a Z% reduction in costs.

Recommended Reading: High Growth Handbook (Elad Gil) + Good to Great (Jim Collins)

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Lesson #7 — Nurture your team culture

The last and, arguably, the most important lesson is team culture.

“Bad culture is characterised by fear, stress, complaints and employees who don’t feel they can tell the truth. Good culture fosters trust, support and openness from employees.” — Simon Sinek

Culture is tough to define but it most certainly comes from the top down and embodies the “why” of your business — your purpose or reason for being. Everyone by now must have come across Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle (if you haven’t, check it out). People will follow you if they understand your “why” but it isn’t always easy to hire people that believe in your “why”. Some people just want to be paid and then go home.

To nurture a positive company culture — you need to truly understand your “why” to remain focused on driving value for the business. Communicate this purpose clearly and often whilst being transparent about decisions and open about structure. A great culture will inevitably follow. If people are working against these things, it will be obvious. Unfortunately, it’s important to quickly remove the disruptive or harmful team members.

“A small team, committed to a cause bigger than themselves, can achieve absolutely anything” — Simon Sinek

Some people want to be top performers and work in a fast-paced environment but others do not. Be clear about your intentions and expectations from day one. Make sure you tell each person your desired outcome and how to exceed expectations. You will quickly see whether people are on the same path as you.

By the time you reach this stage in a business, you should have built a good framework on which to evolve and that evolution is different for everyone. Take it one step at a time and nurture your relationships, they are the glue that holds you together.

Recommended Reading: The Advantage (Patrick Lencioni) and No Rules Rules (Reed Hasting and Erin Meyer)

Image credit — Debashis RC Biswas on Unsplash

Final Thoughts

If you have followed the advice above — you should have a strong team, product development process and IT systems in place to manage risk as you scale. At this point, you’re geared for hyper-growth and ready to rumble! Now, you truly have something to grow and protect. Your next challenge is to navigate your market conditions and stay ahead of the game.

It seems simple but too often people lose sight of their purpose as they grow.

There are many things outside your control including; new regulations, technological disruptions and even macro-economic impacts. Of course, you can only make the best decisions with the information you have available. So, what questions should you ask to get more information?

Here are a few to ponder over as your rocket ship takes off:

• What stands in your way?
• What external factors will influence your product’s success?
• What are your biggest risks or fears?
• What is your next inflexion point?

The ultimate point to make here is that as a CTO, where does your journey end? Have built a team that can function well without you — have you created a succession plan? If so, then great, if not then why not?

We’re all human. We all get excited by different things and, once the business gets bigger, it may not excite you anymore. If your role is more hands-off and you find yourself managing more people or spending more time in meetings — your thirst for the job may disappear. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s an important thing to recognise and plan for. Some CTOs enjoy the thrill of taking a business from 0 to 1, others embrace stability and love working in much larger organisations with bigger budgets and bigger teams.

At the end of the day, a CTO is not judged by what they’ve built but by how well it lasts.

As a CTO, you have to know when to leave and, ideally, leave when you’re ahead. Make sure that you’ve identified potential replacements that fully understand all aspects of your job. You want them to maintain the culture you’ve built because, at the end of the day, a CTO is not judged by what they’ve built but by how well it lasts…

Good luck folks! I hope that these lessons have given you some food for thought at the very least. Feel free to connect with us on LinkedIn — we’re happy to help where we can.

About the Authors

#ScaleupLessons is written by serial entrepreneurs, engineers and technologists to share knowledge about scaling startups across various industries. This blog was written by:

Bhairav Patel — Bhairav is the Managing Director of Atom CTO, a company that provides strategic and operational tech advice to startups, scale-ups, SMEs and investors. He has over 23 years of experience in the tech industry and has been the CTO for a number of award-winning startups and scale-ups across the globe.

Selby Cary — is a serial entrepreneur, inventor and engineer with a passion for data-driven and automated systems. Previously, Selby co-founded ZIVA Robotics, an award-winning deep tech startup based in Edinburgh, before joining TestCard.com to accelerate affordable at-home digital healthcare. In his free time, Selby hosts the Edinburgh Tech Meetup and Entrepreneurs Social Club, bringing the tech startup community together one meetup at a time.