Founding Engineer vs. CTO, who is the right one for your startup? 🤓
A founding engineer is a key member of a startup team, as they are responsible for designing, building, and maintaining the company's technology.
One of the first questions a founder in tech might ask is: Who is gonna be my CTO? From our point of view, that is the wrong way of tackling your startup foundations. You probably don’t need a CTO; instead, you might need a founding engineer.
First of all, let’s start talking about startup foundations. To build your technology startup, you need tech-savvy people who have the following characteristics:
💼 Building a business should be your concern; technology is a means to an end.
⭐ Bring the correct values for the company to build and iterate with the right mindset
🚀 They know about relevant tech to your business (the degree of it can vary depending on the role)
❌ They are not perfectionists. They make mistakes and iterate
With this said, do we need to consider the advantages of hiring a CTO vs. a Founding Engineer? And, with this said, how does a CTO role work in a startup?
Distilling the CTO and Founding Engineer
In a startup, a founding engineer is typically a founding team member responsible for building and developing the company's technology infrastructure, products, and services. They are often involved in the early stages of the company's growth and development and may play a key role in shaping the company's vision and direction.
A CTO in a startup is usually a high-ranking executive who comes in to help shape the company's tech strategy and operations as it grows. They deeply understand the company's technology and ensure it fits with its business goals. A CTO isn't necessarily involved in a company's early stages. They're typically brought in to steer the tech strategy and operations as the company grows.
Why Founding/generalist engineers
Startups often need generalist engineers because they typically have limited resources and must be agile and adaptable to survive and thrive in a competitive market. Generalist engineers are well-suited for startups because they have a broad range of technical skills and can work on various projects and tasks. This allows them to be flexible and adaptable and to quickly pivot and shift focus as needed in response to changing market conditions and business needs.
With this said, your startup is just conformed of just a CEO and a CTO, and your CTO is a regular Software Engineer (a generalist in most cases); There’s no way around it, the title of CTO does not mean a thing while building a product, it just means this person is gonna have a lot of work to do and hiring this profiles have some implications:
You probably give away more equity than you would with a Founding Engineer because you are building a long-term relationship, and you expect the decision ownership to be split between two people
You are giving the ownership to this role to form a team of engineers, and if you don’t expect that person to build, it will just slow down your team as that person will become a project manager (just exactly what you don’t need, trust us)
Is it worth finding a CTO to start my company?
Based on our experience working in the startup world, we still cannot form a conclusion to this, but we have some complex opinions around this:
If you know a person you know can be your CTO, you have worked with them, and you think they will prove they are valuable business partners, you are good to go.
If you are looking for a CTO and want the CTO to start building your product from scratch, please stop. Find a great software engineer, and test your relationship with that person first. Hiring a CTO for the sake of it will get you in trouble. The thing with this is that you are giving too much power to someone you believe might do the job, but you have no idea how it will turn out.
You better stick with someone you know before giving your equity to a regular software engineer, who sometimes doesn’t even know what they’re doing.
CTOs are not required to build your startup, but engineers are.
A CTO should be hired when a company's technology needs are more complex and require a senior-level executive to oversee and manage the technology strategy and operations. A CTO can help ensure that the company's technology aligns with its business goals and objectives and can provide valuable expertise and guidance as the company grows and evolves.
A CTO can help identify and implement new technologies and solutions that can help drive business growth and competitiveness. Therefore, a CTO should be hired when a company's technology needs exceed the existing team's capabilities and require a more senior level of expertise and leadership.
Conclusions
We hope this guide will help you. It certainly can be a stressful exercise to find a technological partner to get started with your business. We have seen a lot of cases where the wrong CTOs were hired. You can avoid that; get an excellent founding engineer 🙂.
By the way! We know excellent engineers. Are you looking for one to join your startup? Ping us at info@generalistengineer.com