Thoughts on the role of a CTO and growing a startup

Three titles: VP/Eng, CTO, and Chief Architect. Each one you have on your team, I predict your dev cycle is 5 months longer. If you have a CTO, VP/Eng, and a "Chief Architect", then before your Junior Director of User Interface Quality Engineering has laid down his first line of JSP templating code, you're looking down the barrel of 15 months of overhead.

The role of a CTO is to have a cool title in sales and partnership meetings. Make your CTO your very best sales engineer.

The only thing I'd add to this article is that in the earliest stages of the company (where there's just a handful of people), the CTO is also the VP of Engineering and also the programming lead.

True at our company of two both the CEO and CTO are the programmers. CEO does a little more with the business side of the world. CTO spends a little more time on architecture. I assume the roles will become a little different and more defined as the company grows

There was an article on here a while back with a great description of the CTO role:

"The CTO's primary job is to make sure the company's technology strategy serves its business strategy"