With all due respect, if this is a tech startup.  How good can its odds of success be if they&#x27;re actually considering converting an intern into the CTO?<p>I mean, for me personally if I were interviewing there for a staff engineering position and I found out that they&#x27;d taken somebody with very little professional experience as an engineer, along with zero executive&#x2F;leadership experience (director, VP, GM, etc.), and then made them CTO... I&#x27;d wonder what was wrong with the rest of the company leadership.<p>For reasons not the least of which are... when you go seek funding any half-way legitimate investor is almost certainly going to look at the leadership team, its prior experience, its successes, its failures, etc.  Unless the thing you guys are doing is the world&#x27;s most amazing product that&#x27;s hyper defensible and hyper differentiated, then a huge component of what the investors are evaluating isn&#x27;t the business or the product... it&#x27;s the team.<p>But all that said, you&#x27;d learn a whole crapload from the experience, so perhaps it&#x27;s best just to have at it.<p>About the only other thing I can say is... if you&#x27;re having to ask this question in a public forum on the internet to a bunch of strangers, then that&#x27;s probably a pretty useful indicator of your actual preparedness in and of itself.