Valueless CTO: High Salary, No Return

So, I’ve been called a bad CTO a few times, and people even told me they wouldn’t work for me even if I were the last CTO on earth. Quite a statement, right? Thank god that’s just Reddit talking, and I usually don’t expect any good comments whenever I get traffic from Reddit. But this whole hate made me think.

What’s the value of a CTO? Can a CTO be worthless to a company? While everyone loves to read HN Stories about the rockstar CTOs who perform magic while programming in all the languages at once, that doesn’t represent the real world. I’ve talked with companies that fired their CTO because they’ve gotten way too comfortable and haven’t done much in terms of moving the company forward. So, do you ever wonder what happens to a company if the CTO doesn’t really know what they’re doing?

I thought long and hard about what kind of CTOs are worthless to startups; I was mostly thinking about what I should and shouldn’t be doing for the board to vote me out. I ended up with four main archetypes and their missing value that I want to go deeper into:

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