Title: I have been struck recently over many conversations with different VC-funded startup CEOs (series A or B money, all at least $5M) at how strong the CTO&#x2F;tech team rockstar&#x2F;ninja kool-aid seems to be.  &quot;Our tech guys are smarter than everyone else in the world&quot; seems to be a pervasive sentiment.  Generally speaking, the CTO&#x2F;tech team also seems to believe that about themselves, and usually the CEO is personally self-effacing and does not have that kind of personal arrogance.<p>I know that there are dark days and uncertainty within a startup, and that you do have to &quot;fake it until you make it&quot;, but there&#x27;s a real danger in drinking that kool-aid and missing out on the fact that everything reverts to the mean, and not everyone can even be &quot;above average&quot;, let alone the smartest people in the world.  The reality is that your startup that&#x27;s survived to series A likely has pretty decent tech talent, but it&#x27;s unlikely that they&#x27;re significantly better than the tech talent at other startups that have survived similarly.<p>In particular, it is a big mistake to assume that your tech team is going to be able to solve problems that were really hard for other tech teams, unless you&#x27;re willing to make solving those problems one of your core competencies (and the other tech teams were not willing to do so).<p>As a tech co-founder, I am extremely appreciative of the support that I get from my CEO, but I would never want her to (nor does she) assume that I will be able to solve problems that other talented teams have failed to solve for way less money and&#x2F;or in way less time and&#x2F;or with way less organizational focus than they have.<p>So if you&#x27;re a tech CEO who believes that your CTO and tech teams are far superior to everyone else out there, I would say: the confidence is good, and probably necessary, but you have to make sure that you spend some of your time sober enough to acknowledge reality.
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