OK, you're a CTO now... What did you get yourself into? Mentor Talk @ Founder Fuel Fall 2011.

1. OK, you're a CTO now...
What did you get yourself into?
Founder Fuel Fall 2011
by Sylvain Carle
CTO and co-founder at Needium
@froginthevalley to /quote me
[ these slides are so undesigned, but I guess it makes a point ]
CC-BY-SA - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

2. SCOPE
★CTO : Chief Technical Officer
★Also a co-founder (important)
★In the context of an
internet/software startup

3. Define Startup
★Startup: an organization formed
to search for a repeatable and
scalable business model.
http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-principles/

4. OK, that should cover
★Lets’ get into the details now
★That’s were the devil is, you know

5. 4 parts to a startup
★Market
★Product
★Team
★Business Model

6. You are in charge of all 4
★ Plus all the crap that needs to be
done to run a business, boring stuff
like payrolls, budgets, bills to pay,
lawyers, governments rules, etc.
★basically anything that requires
a fax in the process (argh!)

7. But your real job
★is to SHIP
★Getting Things DONE
★Making Things HAPPEN

8. The KEY difference
★Between a developer and a CTO
★ is making things go forward
★ in other words, the buck stops
here: you have to decide
★ no one else is going to save you
★You are the chief "unstucker"

9. Decisions, decisions
★Take co-ownership
with your co-founder(s)
★ Market
★ Product
★ Team
★ Business Model

10. Building the business
★ Know strengths and weaknesses of
founding/dev/ops team(s).
★ Keep the macro/meta view
★ Make yourself unecessary
★ Technology is the enabler not the goal.
Repeat that again.
★ Architect the business as much
as the product/technology.

11. Key Tasks
★Managing dev/ops team
★Hiring
★Roadmapping
★Shipping
★Managing business
★Outsource / delegate but know

12. Key Tasks
★Managing the technology
★Development
★Operations
★Office IT
★Budgeting

13. Key Tasks
★Managing the Product
★Know your Market
★Business Model discovery
★Adapting (continuously)

14. Key Attributes
★You like learning (a lot)
★You are pragmatic not dogmatic
★You can stay calm during storms
★You organize yourself and others
(just enough)
★You are a good communicator

15. Pragmatic
★Keep in mind the
business objectives
★It’s not about you
★Sometimes, the answer is
less technology, not more

16. Calm
★Shit will hit the fan
★You can’t plan everything
★But you can plan redundancy
★Accept failure
★Apologize, be humble

17. Organized
★Have Macro and Micro objectives
★Slice time: Hour/Day/Week/
Month/Quarter/Year (not more).
★Find & File. Pick & Pass.
★Store & Share. Non-Blocking I/O.

18. Communication
★Be explicit
★Learn to listen more
★Management by walking around
(version 2.0)
★What you don’t want to do is
probably what needs to be done.

19. Where I learned
★People around me, all the time.
★Books: Founders at Work, Getting
Things Done, Making Things
Happen, Being Geek.
★Venture Hacks. Hacker News.
Quora. Serendipity, seriously.
★Just Fraking Do It. Think META.

20. Benevolent Dictator
★Saying NO
★Saying YES
★Always move things FORWARD
★Time to THINK. Time to get things
DONE. Time to DO.

21. Mindset
★Be honest with yourself and your
family and friends
★Be megalomaniac with your
market and product BUT humble
with your team
★Take time OFF. Fully & Partially.

22. Tools to get things done
★Email: short, one topic, @next
★ToDo list: text file accesible from
everywhere (dropbox + editors)
★Google Apps: share more, re-use
★Redmine: roadmap, tickets
★Github: code

23. What it really means
★ http://www.scottporad.com/2010/11/12/what-it-really-means-to-be-a-cto/
★ He told me that when the CEO, Ben Huh, hired him on, the site was a mess. The
complex process of processing user submitted content was managed entirely by a
thorny tangle of PHP (in WordPress) and .NET. This weird mix of ugliness was written by
a contractor over the course of the preceeding six months. It was undocumented and
messy. The obvious thing to do was get rid of it, and start fresh.
★ So, he sat down and talked to the CEO. Times were tight: they’d raised a small round to
acquire the original domain and hire some staff, but the money was disappearing
quickly. New features were needed to support better monetization, and they couldn’t
get them done frequently enough.
★ Scott had a terrible decision to make. He could scrap six person-months of work and
build the site anew. It would scale better, reducing costs would be easier, and he
wouldn’t have to mix PHP and .NET. They could purge their technical debt with one fell
swoop.
★ But, that’s not what he did. He told me that he wasn’t sure the company could survive
locking down the business while he attended to development housecleaning. So, he
kept the company on the original codebase, platform, and architecture.

24. Conclusion
★Market, Product, Team, Model
★Architect the Business
★Decide: kayaking metaphor
★Makings things happen is not
the same as doing them yourself
★It’s (mostly) about PEOPLE!

25. Thanks! Questions?
★ My company - http://needium.com/
★ My blog - http://afroginthevalley.com
★ On Twitter - @froginthevalley
★ Bug me by email - scarle@gmail.com
★ There is no dumb question.