CTO Lunches
ctolunches.com
ctolunches.com
As far as I can tell, the influence of the sponsor is limited to a thank you at lunch and a shout out on the website. But I understand your concern about the tension. This is something that every volunteer organization or meetup group struggles with:
1. It usually costs money to put on an event worth going to. Not a ton, but food, beverages and space aren't free.
2. People prefer free (and tech people tend to expect free).
I know another meetup that struggled for years trying to solve this problem, and never found a satisfactory answer.
The answers I have seen work for groups are:
1. Find sponsors and thank them
2. Charge a membership fee
3. Only do free stuff (meet in the library, or a park)
4. Have the meetup organizer pay out of pocket (a different kind of sponsorship)
5. Be lucky enough to have already acquired some kind of income generation (typically an older established gepup like a fraternal order)
It's a tough problem.
You'd have to ask Miles (who commented above) why he made the switch to sponsorship.
We've lucked out in Boulder & Denver where we can make a reservation for that big, but a lot of places I've talked to want event fees, so I'm still going to avoid that, but it'd be nice to have the option.
However, the best bang for the buck, in terms of strategic insight, is probably the email list.
That's a big part of what I'm trying to help scale for the group.
That’s pretty much the basic concept behind every professional networking conference, doesn’t seem very controversial.
I often have lunch or drinks with other people in our domain, and I don't see why we would ever want a sponsor, we just go out together to eat and/or drink, talk about stuff, you know, just like that.
Could CTO Lunches remain small?
Are you organized as a 501(c)(3), a charity where donations are tax-deductible and therefore must not be used for commercial purposes? (That would be effective but is almost certainly too much overhead.)
(Cool project, btw.)
Since you asked, and I started this project simply to benefit the community, I'll dump my thoughts on scaling here (would appreciate any feedback!)
1. Each city has a captain, who is responsible for setting the time & place of each monthly lunch (and possibly for facilitating monthly local email threads / activity updates). A good captain is key to keeping that small, local community feeling going. <<< This is the main answer to your question.
EDIT: I think it's super important to reiterate that each local captain is an engineering leader themselves. It's not some marketing person from a dev-oriented company.
2. Sponsors -- we only have 1 sponsor right now (name.com), and it's about a month old. I met them while organizing Boulder Startup Week because they were volunteering to help organize BSW too. They're headquatered in Denver, so 1 person from the company comes to the Boulder & Denver lunches (they don't give pitches, they just eat lunch and mingle). I still need to talk with name.com if they're interested in continuing to sponsor the group world wide, which would be cool because they're great at video content and they hate timeshare pitches as much as we do. But if they'd like to keep it local, then I think all sponsors should be local. I know in each startup community there are small to mid size companies doing cool, valuable work and not being jerks about it. Those are the types of sponsors that would be valuable to the group, so that's what I'd help focus on.
3. Even more value -- I really haven't thought this through, but I'd love it if I could spend all of my time providing more value to the group. Outside of the time I've spent being a CTO & co-founder of a VC backed company, I love writing books, doing interviews (Kevin & I did StartupCTO.io, a podcast for a while), putting on events, and building little SaaS tools to help people. I'm not sure how to support myself financially to do that (maybe there's a paid premium membership that's optional for people? But the email list & in person event would always be free! Maybe sponsors help me with that?), but that would be amazing.
Oh and structure of the email list: * Everyone * Colorado * Texas * ...
where members can always email just their local group, but they have the option of participating in or starting discussions with the international community.
The email list discussions have blown me away. People will literally write 10 paragraph emails about their decades of experience, and because it's not in a chat format, all members can check their email whenever and see the thread.
1. CTOs & VPs of Engineering of VC backed, bootstrapped, or publicly traded, companies with employee counts of 10-5,000. This makes up the bulk of the members (probably 90%).
2. Engineers who have started their own companies as CEO. They're engineers, have been their entire life, and still do some coding because they love it, but now they happen to also be responsible for other stuff. (5%)
3. CTOs of new startups, out of an accelerator (usually Techstars, Boomtown, or YC). They're teams > 3, so this type of CTO still does a fair bit of coding, but also manages a few resources (either FT, PT, or outsourced) to get engineering done. Their goal is to learn from all the experience in the group. (5%)
But when you look at Engineering leadership, when you're small (one engineering team) that means the CTO can talk to any engineer and understand and advise them on the technical goals of the product and the processes by which that product is being produced.
As you get larger the CTO needs to be able to explain to a customer's technical staff why their product is the way it is, and how that relates to what the customer wants to do with it. At this point you are probably mentoring more people than managing them, having hired managers for the day to day.
Larger still and the CTO is not only helping customer's see the value, they are watching the changes in the technology that are going to make the current products obsolete in 3 to 5 years. They spend a lot of time looking forward so that they can warn the engineering leadership when it is time to swerve.
Once you're an "Enterprise company" there are now lots of people who are the CTO of this, or the CTO of that. But the actual CTO is an integral part of the executive staff who is keeping the enterprise value up by, most likely, working with the M&A team to acquire companies that will shore up gaps in the strategy.
However, context is very important. Anyone that looks at someone's resume and sees that they're the CEO of a single person company will understand that they're on a different level than the CEO of a publicly traded company.
EDIT: the other thing that gets conflated here in these title discussions is non-technical founders thinking they need a CTO, when really they just need a lead developer. That definitely muddies up the conversations.
That said, I think that a CTO of a 2 person company and a 500 person company deal with a few of the same issues, but a lot of the same responsibility (tech leadership, the final arbiter of tech decisions).
I suggest you check your attitude.
The comment "Certainly developers do move into CTO roles (myself included)" seems helpful there.
Ask me any questions you have!
You could be CTO in a company of just 1 and having a lot of interesting things to bring to a discussion, and could be a CTO in a company of 10'000 and be dull and worthless in a discussion. You could even not be a "CTO" but a skilled dev with experience and a lot of interesting things to say.
I'll be frank, most of the time these lunches / socials are a waste of time.
Why, well there are mostly two types of people that go to them:
* the wunderkids who are there to evangelize their amazing product that they built using Haskell and a C++ engine. They aren't really interested in anybody else (fair enough).
* the recruiters / poachers / ruby fanboys , who are there to get you signed up.
sorry Ruby fanboys/fangirls; I had to pick on someone.
This is exactly why I started this group though, to try to avoid this. I try to avoid this with a few tactics:
1. Every social event for developers or nerds like me has been awkward as hell. No one wants to stand in the corner with a beer avoiding people, or shouting over loud ass music. The lunch format has helped avoid that. I've really found that breaking bread and sitting down with food in front of you makes a big difference in the social interactions and the people that feel comfortable coming. You end up making high value connections with the 1-2 people sitting next to you.
2. Local captains are engineering leaders themselves, and they hand curate the group, and kick people out if they're being all sales-y. I curate the Boulder lunch, and it's all engineering leaders facing the same problems. No one except engineering leaders are allowed to come. The only exception to that is our first sponsor, name.com, who sends their 1 community outreach person to eat lunch, chit chat (not a pitch to the whole group), and picks up the tab at the Boulder lunch.
3. The email list provides so much additional value to the group, and because it's email (as opposed to group chat), people love writing long responses and participating over time (sometimes hours, days, or weeks after the last email in the thread has been sent), not just participating in the fleeting moment of a group chat discussion.
Join the waitlist!
I run a community called enrich (joinenrich.com), which connects CTOs/Engineering Leaders with their peers to form more real connections - so you can call folks on a whim.
Total focus is on developing more long-term, authentic relationships. No sponsorship. Ping me if interested.
FYI, the hamburger menu on your mobile site is empty for Firefox and chrome.
And thank you on the hamburger comment!
Chief -> Top, big cheese, main dude (or dudette)
Technology -> Like computers and stuff
Officer -> Simple definition: "Officers are responsible for the management and day-to-day operations of the corporation." You know, like making decisions and helping the company be successful.
If you fit into that description, even if you don't have that specific title, you are acting as a CTO. Lots of VPs of Engineering fit into that title. So do lots of CEOs of software companies.