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Titles are a form of compensation. When you are a cash-strapped startup, especially in a domain that's not particularly lucrative, you pay people with titles.

If this incident hadn't happened, these folks could have proudly claimed that they were the CTO/COO/CPO etc of Shadow Inc on their LinkedIns and whatever article BuzzFeed/Forbes wrote about them.

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With the exception of CTO, none of them seem to be engineers.

If I'm on the hiring end, this is not something that will help. Instead, if someone's going to sell me the importance of their title at their 6 people startup, it's going to negatively affect their chances.

It's the other way around - if you're trying to recruit an engineer or ops person from FAANMG, you can tell them "Well, I know you're an SWE 2 and make $300K/year, and we can't match that, but guess what, you can be the VP of Engineering at our 2-person startup and when we go public, you'll be a VP or SVP of a public company." You'd be surprised how many people fall for that.

The COO majored in Music Technology at Oberlin. That's quite a bit more technical than most people realize. TIMARA (the music tech program at the Oberlin Conservatory) involves a decent amount of programming and/or audio engineering. To put that in perspective, the founder of Macromind/Macromedia (Marc Canter) is also an alumnus of TIMARA.

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