Largely agree here. We're a few years in (nowhere near "old") but I have seen a lot of these questions and these end up being the most humbling, but rewarding,

Largely agree here. We're a few years in (nowhere near "old") but I have seen a lot of these questions and these end up being the most humbling, but rewarding, experiences. There's large swaths of CTOs who are only hired to code at early stage startups. CTO is a real title with many overloaded definitions. The duties also vastly depend on the industry/vertical. Eg: I'm a CTO for an infra startup that sells to large companies. Part of my job is technology direction, part of it is sales, part of it is keeping the engineering team happy, and part of it is coding. I'm imagining a CTO for a more cookie cutter SAAS startup would have a some overlap but a lot of differences. A lot of my job is just aligning code being written to revenue and attaching ROI to projects being done. I've become a way better communicator over the years by sheer force. Otherwise you can't get much done. Technology at the end of the day is about delivering value to customers. A big part of the CTO's job is making sure that that happens. Duties tend to change as teams grow too. The CTO title is a moving definition. Company vertical/business model and stage matter quite a bit here. I would say overall, when you're small, you're just doing what a founder does: filling in the gaps till you are ready to hire someone better than you for the role you hand off.