How to Go From Google Engineer to First-Time CTO
firstround.com
firstround.com
> The “build your rig” workstation budget was a good idea... at least until one of our new hires requested one [...] Suddenly we had hires asking to use their own laptops and spend their budgets on expensive peripherals. Others wanted to assemble systems that were sure to be an IT nightmare and high-maintenance. And all the while I knew everyone should be using Mac OS X because it would be clean and simple.
Isn't this the whole point of the perk? All corporates want you to use their own clean, consistent, standard desktop, even though we have more powerful tools at home customised to our likings.
Letting me use my own laptop and giving me a nice huge monitor and chair to pair it with at work would cost less and come with real productivity benefits.
It really doesn't, people just think it does :)
There is a persistent misreading of the law, mostly by engineers.
It's actually pretty close to most other states laws in practice.
If you work for a very very very focused startup, sure, you may end up owning some personal stuff. You would in a lot of other states too.
If you work for any mid-sized tech company or larger, you probably won't own much, unless your interests are really off the wall.
The law allows employers to claim inventions that relate to an employers business, which for most mid-sized or larger tech companies, covers a lot (IE Apple's business is not just phones and computers, it's mapping, video editing, music software, word processing, distributed cloud services, etc).
In addition, if your invention relates to any actual or "demonstrably anticipated research", that would be covered too.
So if's demonstrable that apple was going to start exploring (not producing) social games, any social games you made (direct), or social platforms (they are "related"), or heck probably even social apps ('related' to that research) or ... would also be arguably be covered.
Over time, the research of most tech companies quickly expands to cover almost everything (since they frequently seek new markets), even if they never do it, ....
why it is considered a perk? Ability to configure tools/workspace (at the $3-5K cost) by an employee (who costs $200K+ to the company) to maximize productivity of the employee and/or time the employee spends working productively at the workspace - doesn't it sound like a "perk" for the employer?
I agree. It's better to give a generous amount of vacations every year (5-6 weeks) than say "it's unlimited!". Also make sure you "punish" people not taking any vacations.
Also related, we don't have "hours". To avoid the perverse effect of people working 10h/day, I make it clear by showing up at 11h some days or leaving a 15h00.
Working hard is important, working a lot, not that important: I pay you for results, not for presence.
I have 28 days + Christmas Eve + New Year's Eve (+ bank holidays), which is not particularly exceptional in Germany.
So to recap, the OP was an ex-Googler, who had been an early stage engineer at a funded startup which got a pretty massive exit. Who wouldn't want this person as a CTO? :)
(Disclosure - I know Ian, the author of the article, and a few Artillery employees)
Becoming a CTO of a company that can afford to actually pay you a salary, is tougher. Now, you probably need a solid track record of achievement, because they can afford to be choosy. Maybe even choosy enough to just make you "SVP of Engineering" instead of CTO. They'll want you to have shipped products you played a leading role in building from the ground up, to be able to build and lead an engineering organization, and to have very strong business sense. But now you've got the financial security of a salary and the tremendous upside of a founder's equity stake.
Becoming a CTO of a company that's actually growing is even harder, because you actually have to be competent enough to have led that company from some venture crazy enough to take a chance on you to real traction (at least on the investment front) and success. This really is the hard part, and I think that's what makes the author's perspective really valuable.
The main mistakes that junior engineers make when they accept the role of CTO is to think it's a 100% technical job. It's not, especially when you have fewer than 30 employees.
The CTO title is pretty meaningless unless the company either has > 30 employees or has at least one successful product.
Seriously though, this obviously takes some manual intervention to achieve this kind of variance in the content layout (where blockquotes are full width, but content p's only take the left 2/3). Does anyone here have any visibility into how they do this from the editorial side, and where I could try and hire an editor who actually gave a shit about this kind of thing?