You Don't Need a CTO, You Need a Founding Engineer

A lot of early stage startups are too eager to put a CTO label on a person who is doing a hands-on and mostly non-strategic job at that stage - most tech startups actually start with a founding engineer or engineers, even if one of them has the title of CTO.

To be fair, investors are guilty of pushing this too (where’s your CTO?).

You might say that labels don’t matter, and in a vacuum they don’t. But this leads to a kind of expectation creep, that may be neither in the interest of the individual or the company. There’s a psychological effect attached to job titles whether we like it or not - either a person feels they have to live up to that job title by doing things against their instincts, or the inverse - they feel annoyed that they aren’t being given enough license to set the strategy.

I think Founding Engineer is a less committal title, more representative of the shape of the early technical work, and most importantly - there is no reason that the same person can’t assume the title of CTO later when the business demands it.

Forgive the made up stats, but early technical work is probably 90% hands on and 10% strategic, and it’s good if the job title reflects that. This is probably also why there’s a market, and strong justification for fractional CTOs at early stage.