I had a similar experience. I'm a great coder with good communication and leadership skills. In 2009 I co-founded a hip startup in the TV space. I had experienc

I had a similar experience. I'm a great coder with good communication and leadership skills. In 2009 I co-founded a hip startup in the TV space. I had experience as a senior / architect prior to this, but this was my first time as CTO, let alone any management position. I LOVED the first year. I was solving difficult problems, working productively, coding like crazy, learning a lot about business and startups. But it was just me and a contractor or two. In the second year we were growing and I started to recruit. I didn't really like finding people, but I loved creating a great culture and productive environment, so it wasn't bad. I found some great people to hire and continued to be the lead dev. I started to experiment with process and getting teams to run themselves. By year three we had 12 devs, and multiple teams. I was spending a lot of time cleaning up after unwise decisions and trying to implement process to keep us productive. Our apps and team got big. I loved being in flow and coding so much, I would drop the ball on management tasks to finish features I was shipping. I was involved in too many things: product decisions, partner deals, traveling, and our customer development research (we were floundering and making the wrong product at this point). I hated it. Every time I procrastinated something I got more stressed and depressed. I tried changing my role to lead dev, but it was a mess and I left. After wandering around and experimenting with different things for years, I think I've figured some things out. I'm contracting with multiple long-term clients. The skills and network I earned doing my startup have been great for finding work. I only take projects where I can have a high level of ownership and creativity (no team to deal with). I have been able to work with fun technology across multiple disciplines (in the last year: React, Haskell, Elm, iOS, Swift, Clojure, among others). I do mess around with my own ideas sometimes, but I realized that what I really love is to create products, and I don't like management, or selling things I've created. So I'm most effective creating products with/for other people who are taking the business risk. Not sure if there's anything in there you can use, but good luck! Figure out what you love to do, keep experimenting. I hated being a CTO too. There's no shame in figuring out it's not right for you, but it IS hard to allow yourself to go down in status. For me it was this big ego thing holding me back. Don't make that mistake :)