How to Go From Google Engineer to First-Time CTO

http://firstround.com/article/How-to-Go-From-Google-Engineer-to-First-Time-CTO#!

by nikunjk • 13 years ago

73 30 13 years ago

mangala• 13 years ago

Yes, but how did you become CTO. I'd like to hear that. It's all well and good once you're there.

hkarthik3• 13 years ago

The OP worked for Google for some period starting in 2006 and then went to a funded startup called RedBeacon at some point after they were founded in 2009. RedBeacon had an exit through an acquisition by Home Depot in early 2012.

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? :)

joelandren• 13 years ago

RedBeacon did not have a massive exit.

kelnos• 13 years ago

Great developer != great CTO, by a long shot. Not saying the OP can't be a great CTO, but the things you are saying imply he is a good fit for the job are just... not as related as you think.

aiurtourist• 13 years ago

Redbeacon's acquisition price was not announced, but there's speculation and discussion about the price here: http://www.quora.com/How-much-was-Redbeacon-acquired-for (requires Quora login)

MattLaroche3• 13 years ago

Co-founding a company doesn't hurt in becoming CTO.

(Disclosure - I know Ian, the author of the article, and a few Artillery employees)

acjohnson55• 13 years ago

Becoming a CTO isn't that hard. There are tons of startups out there that are dying for a technical cofounder. The vast majority of them are not going to launch a revenue-generating product, let alone survive. Maybe it's a decent option if you can afford to go without money to build experience. But given the long odds, the opportunity cost is no joke. And if you've chosen your team poorly, you're in for a bumpy, frustrating ride.

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.

laureny• 13 years ago

Junior developers become CTO's of startups all the time, it's really not that remarkable, all you need to be is a co founder and since such teams are usually CEO and CTO, the roles are quite obvious.

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.

UK-Al05• 13 years ago

The majority of the time, becoming doesn't CTO involve being the best technically/business wise. Just being there at the right time, I.E Early employee or co-founder.

guyzero• 13 years ago

Dismissive comment.

icedog• 13 years ago

Anyone else expect this article to incorporate Go (language) into his transition?

mountaineer• 13 years ago

Yes, I did too. Capitalized Go seems to be the common form for referring to golang now.

benjaminwootton• 13 years ago

This made me chuckle:

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.

pbiggar• 13 years ago

The goal is to have a machine you want to use. You don't want to instill opulence as a corporate policy.

jmspring• 13 years ago

From a corporate perspective and from a personal liability perspective, what else is on that laptop and what code/inventions where created when? A big issue is the time/machine/invention intersection. California employment law gives a lot of credence to what you do on your own machine, on your own time is yours. If you use your own hardware for day to day work the lines get muddied.

DannyBee• 13 years ago

"California employment law gives a lot of credence to what you do on your own machine, on your own time is yours"

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, ....

VladRussian2• 13 years ago

Isn't this the whole point of the perk?

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?

altero• 13 years ago

Please do not be so negative. They also provide other great stuff such as chairs and toilet paper.

buster2• 13 years ago

It would be nice to have a proper capitalization on those titles.. What Go? "to Go"? I'm not even native speaker and it looks very confusing to me..

MattLaroche3• 13 years ago

Which grammar guidelines suggest not capitalizing a verb in a title?

buster2• 13 years ago

Apparently there are none, but there are rules followed by some papers..

http://grammar.about.com/od/rs/g/Sentence-Case.htm

shin_lao2• 13 years ago

At first I thought unlimited vacation would be a good idea. After all, it was in Netflix’s famed “Culture Deck,” and it seemed to work well for them. However, this seemed to put more pressure on employees — the good ones might worry that they were taking too much vacation and not take any.

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.

middus• 13 years ago

Fun fact: "Generous amount of vacations every year (5-6 weeks)" corresponds with European employment standards :).

I have 28 days + Christmas Eve + New Year's Eve (+ bank holidays), which is not particularly exceptional in Germany.

shin_lao2• 13 years ago

I know, I live in France and I lived and worked in Germany. :) But it's generous nonetheless, let's not forget it.

jedberg• 13 years ago

The reason the unlimited vacation policy works so well at Netflix is because the execs set a good example by taking plenty of vacation.

Jgrubb• 13 years ago

I really like the layout of this article, so I started poking around the source. I almost screamed when I saw `p class="msContent"` around every paragraph.

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?

How to Go From Google Engineer to First-Time CTO

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