The OP worked for Google for some period starting in 2006 and then went to a funded startup called RedBeacon at some point after they were founded in 2009. RedBeacon had an exit through an acquisition by Home Depot in early 2012.
So to recap, the OP was an ex-Googler, who had been an early stage engineer at a funded startup which got a pretty massive exit. Who wouldn't want this person as a CTO? :)
Okay maybe massive isn't appropriate here, but they had an exit. Compared to the hundreds of startups that just go out of business that's still a good resume booster.
Great developer != great CTO, by a long shot. Not saying the OP can't be a great CTO, but the things you are saying imply he is a good fit for the job are just... not as related as you think.
Becoming a CTO isn't that hard. There are tons of startups out there that are dying for a technical cofounder. The vast majority of them are not going to launch a revenue-generating product, let alone survive. Maybe it's a decent option if you can afford to go without money to build experience. But given the long odds, the opportunity cost is no joke. And if you've chosen your team poorly, you're in for a bumpy, frustrating ride.
Becoming a CTO of a company that can afford to actually pay you a salary, is tougher. Now, you probably need a solid track record of achievement, because they can afford to be choosy. Maybe even choosy enough to just make you "SVP of Engineering" instead of CTO. They'll want you to have shipped products you played a leading role in building from the ground up, to be able to build and lead an engineering organization, and to have very strong business sense. But now you've got the financial security of a salary and the tremendous upside of a founder's equity stake.
Becoming a CTO of a company that's actually growing is even harder, because you actually have to be competent enough to have led that company from some venture crazy enough to take a chance on you to real traction (at least on the investment front) and success. This really is the hard part, and I think that's what makes the author's perspective really valuable.
Junior developers become CTO's of startups all the time, it's really not that remarkable, all you need to be is a co founder and since such teams are usually CEO and CTO, the roles are quite obvious.
The main mistakes that junior engineers make when they accept the role of CTO is to think it's a 100% technical job. It's not, especially when you have fewer than 30 employees.
The CTO title is pretty meaningless unless the company either has > 30 employees or has at least one successful product.
The majority of the time, becoming doesn't CTO involve being the best technically/business wise. Just being there at the right time, I.E Early employee or co-founder.
> The “build your rig” workstation budget was a good idea... at least until one of our new hires requested one [...] Suddenly we had hires asking to use their own laptops and spend their budgets on expensive peripherals. Others wanted to assemble systems that were sure to be an IT nightmare and high-maintenance. And all the while I knew everyone should be using Mac OS X because it would be clean and simple.
Isn't this the whole point of the perk? All corporates want you to use their own clean, consistent, standard desktop, even though we have more powerful tools at home customised to our likings.
Letting me use my own laptop and giving me a nice huge monitor and chair to pair it with at work would cost less and come with real productivity benefits.
From a corporate perspective and from a personal liability perspective, what else is on that laptop and what code/inventions where created when? A big issue is the time/machine/invention intersection. California employment law gives a lot of credence to what you do on your own machine, on your own time is yours. If you use your own hardware for day to day work the lines get muddied.
"California employment law gives a lot of credence to what you do on your own machine, on your own time is yours"
It really doesn't, people just think it does :)
There is a persistent misreading of the law, mostly by engineers.
It's actually pretty close to most other states laws in practice.
If you work for a very very very focused startup, sure, you may end up owning some personal stuff. You would in a lot of other states too.
If you work for any mid-sized tech company or larger, you probably won't own much, unless your interests are really off the wall.
The law allows employers to claim inventions that relate to an employers business, which for most mid-sized or larger tech companies, covers a lot (IE Apple's business is not just phones and computers, it's mapping, video editing, music software, word processing, distributed cloud services, etc).
In addition, if your invention relates to any actual or "demonstrably anticipated research", that would be covered too.
So if's demonstrable that apple was going to start exploring (not producing) social games, any social games you made (direct), or social platforms (they are "related"), or heck probably even social apps ('related' to that research) or ...
would also be arguably be covered.
Over time, the research of most tech companies quickly expands to cover almost everything (since they frequently seek new markets), even if they never do it, ....
why it is considered a perk? Ability to configure tools/workspace (at the $3-5K cost) by an employee (who costs $200K+ to the company) to maximize productivity of the employee and/or time the employee spends working productively at the workspace - doesn't it sound like a "perk" for the employer?
So the AP follows sentence case for titles, but this one follows title case for titles. And in title case, which is another rule, would endorse capitalizing "Go" here.
At first I thought unlimited vacation would be a good idea. After all, it was in Netflix’s famed “Culture Deck,” and it seemed to work well for them. However, this seemed to put more pressure on employees — the good ones might worry that they were taking too much vacation and not take any.
I agree. It's better to give a generous amount of vacations every year (5-6 weeks) than say "it's unlimited!". Also make sure you "punish" people not taking any vacations.
Also related, we don't have "hours". To avoid the perverse effect of people working 10h/day, I make it clear by showing up at 11h some days or leaving a 15h00.
Working hard is important, working a lot, not that important: I pay you for results, not for presence.
I really like the layout of this article, so I started poking around the source. I almost screamed when I saw `p class="msContent"` around every paragraph.
Seriously though, this obviously takes some manual intervention to achieve this kind of variance in the content layout (where blockquotes are full width, but content p's only take the left 2/3). Does anyone here have any visibility into how they do this from the editorial side, and where I could try and hire an editor who actually gave a shit about this kind of thing?
30 comments
[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 77.0 ms ] threadSo to recap, the OP was an ex-Googler, who had been an early stage engineer at a funded startup which got a pretty massive exit. Who wouldn't want this person as a CTO? :)
(Disclosure - I know Ian, the author of the article, and a few Artillery employees)
Becoming a CTO of a company that can afford to actually pay you a salary, is tougher. Now, you probably need a solid track record of achievement, because they can afford to be choosy. Maybe even choosy enough to just make you "SVP of Engineering" instead of CTO. They'll want you to have shipped products you played a leading role in building from the ground up, to be able to build and lead an engineering organization, and to have very strong business sense. But now you've got the financial security of a salary and the tremendous upside of a founder's equity stake.
Becoming a CTO of a company that's actually growing is even harder, because you actually have to be competent enough to have led that company from some venture crazy enough to take a chance on you to real traction (at least on the investment front) and success. This really is the hard part, and I think that's what makes the author's perspective really valuable.
The main mistakes that junior engineers make when they accept the role of CTO is to think it's a 100% technical job. It's not, especially when you have fewer than 30 employees.
The CTO title is pretty meaningless unless the company either has > 30 employees or has at least one successful product.
> The “build your rig” workstation budget was a good idea... at least until one of our new hires requested one [...] Suddenly we had hires asking to use their own laptops and spend their budgets on expensive peripherals. Others wanted to assemble systems that were sure to be an IT nightmare and high-maintenance. And all the while I knew everyone should be using Mac OS X because it would be clean and simple.
Isn't this the whole point of the perk? All corporates want you to use their own clean, consistent, standard desktop, even though we have more powerful tools at home customised to our likings.
Letting me use my own laptop and giving me a nice huge monitor and chair to pair it with at work would cost less and come with real productivity benefits.
It really doesn't, people just think it does :)
There is a persistent misreading of the law, mostly by engineers.
It's actually pretty close to most other states laws in practice.
If you work for a very very very focused startup, sure, you may end up owning some personal stuff. You would in a lot of other states too.
If you work for any mid-sized tech company or larger, you probably won't own much, unless your interests are really off the wall.
The law allows employers to claim inventions that relate to an employers business, which for most mid-sized or larger tech companies, covers a lot (IE Apple's business is not just phones and computers, it's mapping, video editing, music software, word processing, distributed cloud services, etc).
In addition, if your invention relates to any actual or "demonstrably anticipated research", that would be covered too.
So if's demonstrable that apple was going to start exploring (not producing) social games, any social games you made (direct), or social platforms (they are "related"), or heck probably even social apps ('related' to that research) or ... would also be arguably be covered.
Over time, the research of most tech companies quickly expands to cover almost everything (since they frequently seek new markets), even if they never do it, ....
why it is considered a perk? Ability to configure tools/workspace (at the $3-5K cost) by an employee (who costs $200K+ to the company) to maximize productivity of the employee and/or time the employee spends working productively at the workspace - doesn't it sound like a "perk" for the employer?
http://grammar.about.com/od/rs/g/Sentence-Case.htm
I agree. It's better to give a generous amount of vacations every year (5-6 weeks) than say "it's unlimited!". Also make sure you "punish" people not taking any vacations.
Also related, we don't have "hours". To avoid the perverse effect of people working 10h/day, I make it clear by showing up at 11h some days or leaving a 15h00.
Working hard is important, working a lot, not that important: I pay you for results, not for presence.
I have 28 days + Christmas Eve + New Year's Eve (+ bank holidays), which is not particularly exceptional in Germany.
Seriously though, this obviously takes some manual intervention to achieve this kind of variance in the content layout (where blockquotes are full width, but content p's only take the left 2/3). Does anyone here have any visibility into how they do this from the editorial side, and where I could try and hire an editor who actually gave a shit about this kind of thing?