it's a buncha hogwash. Companies need a board with a chairman, a president and treasurer, and vice presidents of things like engineering and marketing. If you

it's a buncha hogwash. Companies need a board with a chairman, a president and treasurer, and vice presidents of things like engineering and marketing. If you have 20 people, you don't need more executives than that. If you have an operating business with customers, you'll need a controller, and a director of operations. If the company doesn't do R&D, it's simply an operations company (like say a restaurant or a moving company) you could conceivably call the President also the COO, because operations is critically important to operating the business. Chief this and chief that make sense in a large company with need for extreme specialization, like a chief technical officer for an airline: their core business is not computer systems, but computer systems are critically important, so the guy in charge of all that technology needs authority to make executive decisions and to report directly to the top. But that's not a 20 person situation. The point is, you don't sprinkle all these grandiose titles around to use them all up like at an Aviato or a Pied Piper. You use them to describe meaningful roles that reflect the business and managerial structure of the company, but only in a way that is important. 20 person companies and even 100 people companies don't have that much going on, in general. If your business is developing software, you don't need a CTO (compare above with airline) especially not one who is just a smart founder engineer with limited managerial skills.