Ask HN: Are C-titles (CEO, CTO,) mandatory for a startup? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are C-titles (CEO, CTO,) mandatory for a startup?

10 pointsmojuba4 comments

We are having difficulty clearly "demarcating" the responsibilities among the co-founders and assigning the conventional executive titles.

Obviously, the future investors will be looking for who is who in the company by looking at the titles. Someone has to be the tech lead, someone is marketing, someone has to sign the documents and ultimately take charge of everything.

Among us, however, the lines are blurred and somehow none of us wants to be the CEO or take any of the other conventional CxO titles.

One option I can think of is having a President and a bunch of VP's while leaving the CxO positions open for possible future hires at later rounds. At least there's someone, the President, who will sign the papers.

Are there any other options that wouldn't look too weird from the investors' point of view?

Thank you!

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The E-Myth Revisited, M. Gerber, has some good examples of why it's like that. The thing is when you blur roles, you also blur responsibility.

Organizational charts are like software architecture. In fact, architecture is a subset of org charts. It shows what you're optimizing for. Are you an e-commerce company? Your org chart will have a lot more focus on logistics and payment than a SaaS. Whereas a SaaS will focus more on security and software infrastructure.

You can have a person in multiple roles, e.g. Bob is responsible for HR, finance, and is the mobile lead.

At the seed stage, your goal is to find the business model. So you can have blurry "co-founder" roles for everyone. However someone has to be responsible for fundraising, audits, legal, pitching. Everyone should be able to pitch but someone has to be rehearsing/rewriting the pitch 4 hours/day. So you probably need a CEO.

If you're above seed stage, you are scaling. If you're scaling, you have a business model. If you have a business model that you're committing in stone, you need an org chart. This can be modified later, but well, you should know how much of your resources go into marketing and how much goes into engineering.

Maybe you guys are really responsible and close friends and can distribute that properly. I hear Airbnb was like that. But just be aware why it's a red flag.

Even in games, the positions are demarcated. Some people play forward. Someone in the guild handles research. Someone plays the sniper, not the whole team. So the other worry is that everyone is breaking position and doing engineering and nobody is paying the bills.

Yes, it will be a definite red flag if there is no clear CEO in the company.

However, nothing says these titles have to map in any way to actual responsibilities inside the company. Just make someone CEO on paper, at random if you need to, and disregard the title internally.

These titles are necessary for incorporation (specifically referring to CEO) but not necessarily for running the business. I believe incorporation (depending on the type of Corp) requires a Founder, Chairman, and CEO.

As you step out of the “we are building something in a basement” world and into the financial (funding) world, you’ll see that you can’t avoid this, and that you should go ahead and straighten these things out

Nothing is mandatory. You can be “King of the Decisions” or whatever title you want.

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