Not as bittersweet as it will be when someone with a fraction of your technical ability is chosen over you to be CTO. As the only developer you have no management experience and you will be told 'your job is too important' to take you away from it, although this will be phrased in the form of a compliment about what a great job you are doing. You are completely replaceable (jump under a bus and haunt the office if you don't believe me) but you'll be told otherwise as soon as you mention promotion, which is a basic but very effective ego trick. You will end up with all the responsibility, but little or none of the decision power over what your priorities should be.

My advice to you (besides finishing off your degree as you are close) is to 'discover' a need for additional workers and procure a budget ASAP. The easiest way to get one is to, well, recruit an intern or two, dump as much crap onto them as you can, and then propose converting them to employees. When HR demurs and starts complaining about the cost (because that will reduce the amount of money in their budget) you turn to the CFO and ask if it isn't possible to work something with stock options, and of course no self-respecting CFO is going to let HR dictate upwards. Buy the HR person a consolation gift and find a way to do the CFO a favor.

It's also worth noting that I'm taking a lot of courses on Coursera and am going through the web specializations to add the certifications to my resume, which will definitely help to make up for not having a degree

LOL

...which is horrible but that was my honest reaction :-( I'm twice your age but I remember very well how I used to think along the same lines as you. The degree, from your employer's perspective, isn't about what you know but more of a game coupon for use in bargaining with HR. The fact that you are already seeing people with less knowledge being paid more because they have a degree should be a huge red flag that you don't understand the rules of the game you are playing. Read this over the weekend: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ and then seriously, seriously consider redirecting your efforts on Coursera (or better, credit eligible courses at your local community college) to psychology and/or fundamentals of management, especially micro-economics.

I absolutely don't mean this as an insult or put-down - rather, I wish someone had sat me down and explained how these things work when I was 22. The only places where traditional values of loyalty, hard work, and technical skill are fully valued are in older family-run companies where it's baked into the organizational DNA. Working for a startup or big corporation, you are simply a component with a low cost:benefit ratio.