Show HN: CTOnet, a private community for CTOs and engineering leaders | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: CTOnet, a private community for CTOs and engineering leaders

ctonet.io

15 pointsbkanber15 comments

Someone here asked HN about where to find CTO / Head of Engineering blogs and an informative discussion revealed some good resources, especially books:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19973875

Hi, Burak - are you just launching this or do you already have people participating?

Just launching. I'm going to fill up the first batch and run just that one for a while. If it's working well I'll start opening up more batches.

I'm hoping for the first batch to include 3 people I know personally, plus a dozen brand-new friends.

Sweet - looks like you're in NYC - I'm just across the river in NJ.

Definitely wish you the best of luck, and would be really interested to hear what kind of interest you receive ... have a possibly similar idea in the works, but not necessarily directed at CTOs.

Fantastic idea and very cool to see, I'd love to hear how it goes as you get going. Reminds me of Vistage/EO but for CTOs a bit.

So far so good, already have enough applicants to fill Batch #1!

awesome :)

What forum software are you using?

I custom built it in node. It's a straightforward forum, except with the private groups feature, some modtools for this specific use-case, saving items, and elasticsearch-powered fulltext.

Its best feature is that it doesn't use React or a fancy frontend. It's just server-side rendered, very lightweight, and lightning fast. Still nice and usable though.

lol. didn't angel list start off as something like this? it's an itsy bitsy tiny market, even if every cto joined. personally, the domain sounds pretentious and douchy, and as a cto i would not want to join simply because it sets the wrong impression that "i'm better than you and you are not qualifed to discuss real matters with me - also, as CTO, rest assured I'm only transparent with folks 'at my level', although our company promises transparency to everyone".

also, i could fake those credentials in a heart beat.

just my 2cents, good luck with it though.

Market size isn't a consideration here.. I just like building communities and getting people to help each other. When you're talking about small groups of a dozen people, it doesn't matter so much if there's only 100 or a million in the world.

And I'm certainly open to suggestions on the domain, if you have any ideas!

How about a mentee program for prospective engineering leaders to learn from those in those positions. There's a huge gap in mentorship for this kind of skill set. I can easily find people to teach me the tech side of things, finding information and wisdom on the leadership side has major barriers, in my experience, and a very high noise to signal ratio for finding this info without direction from a mentor.

I'm in the process of building something currently, it will be an online course teaching the basics + mentor/mentee/general career advice forum.

Feel free to email me: anthony@makerleader.com w/ any specific questions, I am happy to help (I am currently in a leadership role in the high frequency trading industry).

It's not exactly the domain, but rather the exclusivity based on title/status that I think is a problem. Someone could be a PM and know 10x more about managing people than a CTO, but would be excluded because you didn't build a meritocracy.

The domain doesn't sound pretentious to me at all. Just a niche forum to discuss things managing and running the tech for a company. I'd love to join and hear from the trenches stories and make contacts.

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