Minimize use of CxO titles at early company stages
venturefizz.com
venturefizz.com
How do you even know if your lead developer is a "rockstar" or not--especially if you're the non-technical co-founder? Are you supposed to give him/her coding tests?
The term "rockstar" needs to die, now. It's a meaningless mumbo-jumbo term invented by someone who didn't understand what developers do.
We use the following terms:
To do items -> ACTION TASKS!
Manager -> Champion.... groan
Meetings -> "Social". As in, "in ten minutes, we're having a social in room 10D.
Cooworker -> Friend.
We have to use these terms, there are so many more, that combined with the fake forced "i love to work here" attitude day in day out is absolutely crushing me.
In Manager -> Leader in the HR context and then the Leader -> Champion in the project management context.
Figuratively -> Literally
Do people in your company use "Social" to mean a conversation about business topics? A "social" is people eating/drinking and chatting informally to get to know each other.
"Champion" is not a "manager". A champion is someone who cares about a project and fights for it. Someone assigned to maange a project might not be a champion -> will neglect it and let it die.
If your company isn't big enough to have middle management, it's not big enough to have Chief Anything Officers. It's completely nonsensical.
On the contrary people outside the company (investors, press, everybody) needs/wants to know which position you and your cofounders fulfill when you meet them.
CXO positions being grabbed at small companies is a sign of a group of dysfunctional, self-congratulating morons looking to ride this to other places willing to pay them even more to be called CXO.
Often, if there's no CTO for example, they might be tempted to hire a more senior person in that role. But if it's taken, well...
CXO titles at small companies are a sign of bad things.
Founding team: Soylent Red
New hires: Soylent Green
The reason VCs don't like to see CxOs already in place is because it makes it harder for them to use the company to hand out jobs to their underachieving middle-aged friends looking for executive sinecures.
This is complete and utter douchebaggery and your IQ will drop 5 points if you read it to completion.
I'm sorry, but if I'm going to go anywhere near a pre-funding startup, I better fucking have some domain X over which no one will ever fucking be hired above me. Sorry, but if I wanted to work at a company where people could be hired above me without me having a say in it, I'd take the $200k+ hedge fund job and wouldn't touch your startup with my worst enemy's dick. This is how talent sees it. Accept it or fail at your own peril.
Job titles don't matter for fuck-all early on, but companies tend to have a weird dynamic. For a long time, titles don't matter and they're so inconsequential that they're never used (business cards are blank on the title line). Sure, someone might be "Chief Revenue Officer" but the only people who even know he has that title are the CEO and Board. When titles are inconsequential, you hurt yourself by bringing them up. So don't. The title is something you have, for later on when you need it, but not something you use-- at all. It just sits there for later purposes.
So, in the early stages, while it's important to have titles, I will agree that you shouldn't explicitly "use" them much. For a 10-person startup, they don't mean anything, operationally, except for where a person will be when they start to mean something. Through this, they motivate talented people to stick with the company even when things get painful.
And then... the company gets to a point where titles do matter and, by that time, I better fucking have one. Unless you can convince me that your company will never have job titles, in which case I don't want to be "that guy" who brings them into existence.
OP seems to support the idea of an early employee taking a pre-emptive hit ("Engineering Director" instead of "VP/Engineering" or "CTO") so other people can be plugged above him, often without his consent. This is because the real perk of being a VC is being able to hand out executive positions in other peoples' companies to your underachieving friends. Fuck that. That's bullshit. You'll never get talent if you take this guy's advice.
The fact is that often the lead developer who builds the first version of a product does not have the skills and experience to be the CTO as the company grows. The first salesperson may well not be ready to build a sales team. The accountant might not have the breadth to be a CFO.
In addition to money, good VCs bring in experience that can dramatically increase the chance of success. They need some flexibility in the organization to be able to do so.
That being said, your comment is an excellent warning to people joining an early stage startup. Know what you want your role to be if and when the company is successful and negotiate appropriately.
Ok, I admit I've never even worked at a startup, so perhaps I'm missing something, but this idea just smells fishy. Why on earth would the lead developer who built a software product from the ground up, possibly single-handedly, not have the "skills and experience" to continue running that codebase as the company grows? Like someone with experience "at scale" and better connections is going to come in later, read/understand all the code the technical co-founder wrote (or perhaps just hire a team to rewrite everything from scratch using a more "scalable" software stack), and take over as CTO, relegating the co-founder to a subordinate role? Has that ever worked?
I actually agree. The right people to build a business are often not the right people to maintain it at maturity. I'd want the title of "CTO" if building someone's product, but I would agree to abdicate it if I agreed with the choice of successor, and was genuinely convinced he'd do a better job than I could. I just wouldn't be happy not to have a say in it. I want to be able to say, "if you hire him above me, then I leave and you just had a CTO quit".
Titles make it hard to demote or fire someone because if they punt you, they just "fired their CTO". You want a title because when millions (and potentially billions) are on the line you can't trust people in power, even if you think you've known them for years.
I think in the OP, it seemed like more of a "you shouldn't let your first developer be the CTO because you want to be able to hire someone more experienced above him when your startup gets big enough to attract real rockstar talent" type of angle. Which, as you pointed out, is repulsive.
Yes and no. I obviously exaggerate the incompetence of such implants. However, let's look at this way. Let's say that I'm an 8/10 for the role (9/10 is where I'm headed, 10/10 is best in the world). No VC is going to risk his investment on a 3/10; that's a 5-point drop. But a 7? A 6 whom he owes a really big favor? A 5 who he seems to think is a 9 because of the 5's superior social skills? Quite likely, yes. The VC would rather have a personal friend at 7-level competence than me at 8. And while 8's and 9's are really rare, 6's and 7's aren't uncommon, and the VC has plenty of 5+ in his network.
I know that I'm really solid at a lot of things. I also know that, while my level of talent may be rare and high, "close enough" is not rare for most purposes. I can't afford to kid myself and underestimate the competition. And to be frank about it, there are a lot of roles in which a 6 and an 8 are interchangeable.
The fact is that often the lead developer who builds the first version of a product does not have the skills and experience to be the CTO as the company grows. The first salesperson may well not be ready to build a sales team. The accountant might not have the breadth to be a CFO.
I'm sure that's true, taking a pragmatic approach, but I also think that's often used as an excuse to throw people under the bus.
Often, the short-term compromises and stress levels cause a situation where good people end up ineligible for the top roles. The guy who pissed off 2/5 of the team by pushing what turned out to be the right decision has too many enemies to be CTO, and the person who built the original system under extreme time pressure is ineligible for VP/Eng because the system is starting to strain.
That happens, and some of it's inevitable, but if someone's going to be hired above me, I want it to be with my consent and voluntary abdication. I'll gladly step down if it's the right thing to do; but I prefer having a say in how it happens. Otherwise, you might as well just fire me.
Long story short, we got acquired and I've still got the same shit title while people who were "managers" of their 1-man team are still managers.
If I ever join a startup again (probably won't happen) I'm not in for anything less than fucking CTO
I wish it didn't work this way. I'd like titles to not matter. I'd like to work in a true meritocracy. But, there will always be outsiders assessing your organization. Oftentimes they'll use title as a proxy for something els--and then it matters again. Especially when that person is a new boss.
The only solution I can think of is to call everyone Beverly.