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There's always time to read, you can't only code. E.g. I run a lot so I get through a hell of a lot of audio books.

I don't think the parent comment means only code, never learn. I think their intention was to not worry too much about the "CTO" title and instead focus on building the product at hand.

Yep. When building a startup you’ll find a lot of well-meaning people (in books or in person) who really do nothing but distract you. YC got it right, you should make something people want. Everything that’s not either making something or finding out what people want is just going to slow you down.

Too reductionist.

You must "sharpen the saw".

This takes many forms including adequate learning / training for self improvement as well as investment in your tooling that will pay dividends on delivering faster or with higher throughput.

These are second and third system effects that require intention to monitor or measure but the effect is real.

Of course nothing is black and white, but if you have limited time/money then you want to get to ramen profitability fast and you simply don’t have time for business model canvases, the perfect employee option scheme, a scalable k8s setup or a perfect CI/CD pipeline.

There’s so much stuff that feels important and valuable, but so little of it really cannot wait until after your wheels are off the ground.

When you read postmortems of startups that didn't get enough customers, often it’s this stuff that actually went wrong. Too much time spent on other stuff than “build something” and “that people want”.

To my experience, it’s difficult to resist all that good advice that’s all over the internet, books, accelerator programs and the like, and saving it all for later. People will tell you “you should get $PETPEEVE right from the start” for every imaginable pet peeve (all the way from legal stuff to unit tests to SEO) and they’ll be very convincing. Trying to resist this is not reductionist, it’s super hard.

It is survivorship bias. Because the companies get to a point where unimportant things are important and you spend years in that second phase, the learnings are upside down. „If only we would have solved technical problem X from day 1 we would have so much less hassle in the years to come.“ Except that solving problem X on day 1 instead of shipping what the company did might have killed the company. I see this in a lot of second time founders, where startup 1 was successful - „this time I‘ll really avoid my mistake X.“

I'd say the time for sharpening the saw was before you started the company. The next opportunity to invest into best practices / long-term is when the company actually has some traction.

The entire point of sharpening the saw is that it is continual though. It doesn't have to be a major investment or long-term, in fact it explicitly references "Daily Self-Renewal". I believe the original comment branch just meant don't worry about "what's applicable to the CTO".

Sure. But the point was that if you're a team of 1 engineer, even if your title is CTO, time spent learning "how to be a CTO" when you don't have any team whatsoever is time not spent building the prototype that needs to demonstrate $XX value/growth by YYYY-MM-DD in order to survive.

Learning is always encouraged, but you should be learning to solve the problems you're about to face. Learning to solve problems which aren't going to be obstacles in the near or mid future isn't helping you in your immediate circumstances. Sometimes the immediate circumstances aren't much of a concern, but when they are, you need to be sure you're learning with that in mind.

Any advice is going to be reductive when measured against the reality of building a startup. While learning and continuous improvement are table stakes, I think the GPs advice is much better to get first-time founders overall. "Sharpening the saw" is likely to feed perfectionist tendencies, or send them into dopamine learning loops online. There's a reason that "bias for action" is treated as a highly valuable trait in founders.

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