One job, many roles: The different skills needed to be a successful CTO
This is one thing I've seen crushing startups - not changing CTO's after traction, but keeping the founder that wrote the MVP as a CTO. It isn't always a bad thing, there are a lot of hackers that fill the role, but when it's not even considered because "he's a founder so he needs to remain CTO" vs "he's got the CTO skills" it is an alarming sign.<p>I've worked in a startup (about 30 ppl)  where the CTO was one of the founders and he was doing nothing but holding the company back with his decisions and his 0-architecture-spaghetti code. My first day, when I saw all the trash going on I thought "ok I can't really quit my first day so they'll have to fire me".<p>Decided to take ownership and start treating him like any other team member, reviewing and declining his merge requests (those weren't use before I came, they just commited all over the place), refactoring, planning ahead because otherwise we would have never delivered on time - his own technical debt extended feature delivery time by weeks. He was aware and admitted his "lack of skills", but wasn't aware of how much he actually lacked.<p>We managed to take it out the gutter and polish it up a lot in the next two years, but after all the mess and his obvious lack of knowledge, he still remained the CTO, long  after I left. So please, if you are a CTO of a startup and are aware you lack skills, don't try to drive technical decisions and actively look for a replacement. Your decisions can create friction for whole company and burn it to ground right before it takes off. And if you work under a CTO like that, just take the damn responsibility and challenge dumb stuff or quit, or you might fall into the sloppy spaghetti.