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This week, I’ve been looking at the evolution of tech startups. The journey from two or three co-founders to an exit or an acquisition is long and arduous, and it turns out that a lot of VCs aren’t particularly picky about who sits in the CTO seat at company formation. That’s a bad idea. Some CTOs are extraordinary and able to build the first MVP version of a startup’s product pretty much single-handedly and then grow into an executive-level strategic leader.
In many cases, however, that’s not what happens, and the CTO was basically the smartest person with a CS degree standing close to the CEO when the company was formed. The end result is that a lot of startups wind up giving a huge chunk of equity to someone who is essentially doing a job a semi-decent engineer could have done. If the company exits for a billi...
