Hiring a CTO

How companies typically arrive at needing a CTO depends on whether the founding team already includes technical leadership:

This depends heavily on who your technical founders are. Have they led teams before? Have they led teams in an early-stage scaling company before?

If the answer to both is no — if your technical founder or founding team are junior SWEs, experienced IC SWEs, tech leads who don't feel comfortable scaling a team, or leads/managers from big companies — then at the early stages it's fine. But it's a big risk to jump from those roles into being CTO of a scaling company with ~100 employees.

They can be a great technical founder and make huge contributions to the early product and technology — but there's a huge difference between that and the role of a CTO. It's quite common that the person who takes a company from 0 → 1 is not the same person to take it from 1 → 100 — arguably even more so when someone is making the leap from IC to CTO.

The problems are very different, and perhaps not what the technical founder had in mind when they started their company. How do they want to spend their time?

• Planning vs hands-on coding
• High-level technical decisions — design, architecture, planning — vs hands-on coding
• Meetings with founding team, product, SWEs, investors, users vs hands-on coding
• Hiring, firing, more hiring, interviewing vs hands-on coding
• Performance reviews & mentoring vs hands-on coding

If that's what they want to do — and they have the knowledge, skills and experience to do it well — then great, you might not need to hire a CTO from outside.

This is almost irrelevant at pre-seed/seed stage — you just need hands-on ICs at this stage anyway. They don't need managing, direction-setting or regular formal 1:1s. They need to sit down and build while self-managing against targets and product releases.

But once you build up to and reach Series A and look at scaling the company, you're going to want someone who knows what they're doing behind the wheel — someone who can lead, organise, hire and set direction.

If one of your technical founders isn't the right person to become the CTO, the lead-up to Series A is when you need to start planning for this.

CTO searches can be difficult even when you dedicate serious time and resources — it's a massively impactful position, so you want a high level of certainty you're hiring the right person. There's also huge variation within the job title: some CTOs are hands-on with limited leadership responsibility; others lead teams of hundreds or thousands.

The process is the same as any other search — starting with defining your ideal profile:

This is driven by your role: is it hands-on, or a people-leadership, direction-setting, strategy role? Typically the latter — but there's a lot of flexibility in this title, possibly because early-stage companies call their hands-on technical co-founder "Founder / CTO" even though they're a hands-on SWE 90% of the time.

The role you need is in turn driven by your stage of growth. At seed stage you don't need a CTO — your technical founder handles everything technical, and you don't have a large enough team for structured performance reviews and the like. Call yourself whatever you want title-wise; your day-to-day job is coding.

Series A — scaling, 20+ people with plans to reach 100+ — is different. That's typically where you start to need the strategic leadership element that will see you through from Series A to Series B and beyond.

The exceptions:

• You have huge funding at an early stage and can begin “hiring ahead of yourself”, knowing you’ll scale bigger from the get-go.
• Your technical co-founder / current CTO is capable of leading the team as you scale and doesn’t need to step aside.

• Your network — ask around; everyone you think might be able to help.
• Referrals — systematise this.
• LinkedIn sourcing — job titles: CTO, Principal SWE, Team Lead, etc.
• Job ads + LinkedIn posts about the role.
• Executive search firms / specialist agencies — this is a more specialist search, so if you’re struggling to fill it you’d benefit more from outsourcing to an agency with an existing network of CTOs.

You'll likely get a much higher response rate from outreach to CTOs — there are fewer roles on the market, so they have less noise in their inbox. Be more direct and straight to the point with senior candidates — less fluff is typically appreciated.