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I find it interesting if not a little disconcerting that the equity table has the startup hiring a COO at 2% - 5% equity but no CTO and the closest it has liste
by throwaway2016a 9y ago
I find it interesting if not a little disconcerting that the equity table has the startup hiring a COO at 2% - 5% equity but no CTO and the closest it has listed is "Lead Engineer" at 0.5% - 1%. I suppose there could be a VP of engineering under that chart since it doesn't specify what type of VP.
This article seems to be propagating the myth that engineers need MBA types more than they need engineers.
The article also advocates heavy contracting.
Speaking from experience, if you are contracting out most of your software engineering and don't have a CTO type role who knows what good code is and knows how to manage the contractors, you are in for a really bad time when you do decide to bring on full time software engineers. You risk overpaying and risk having completely unmaintainable code that doesn't scale with your business.
Conversely, much of what a COO does can be done by the CEO at early stages.
Of course, no two startups are the same. In fact, a bad CTO can be more damaging that not having any. Which is why it is important you screen your hires well. However, your milage may vary.
- hkmurakami 9y agoa bit offtopic but -- imo technical folks don't need MBAs. However you _do_ need a person who can sell. That person might have a technical background, might happen to have a MBA (though frankly very few MBA types are very good salespeople), but honestly the skill is orthogonal to anything else. The question you ask an engineer is "can you build this?". The question you ask a business cofounder is "can you sell this?"
- mgkimsal 9y agoso true. to get a bit pedantic, there's generally no 'business' to 'administrate' in the early days, so an 'MBA' is... not specifically useful. To the extent an 'MBA' is useful, it's probably in doing things that are tangential to the degree itself.
- throwaway2016a 9y agoLate replying but... I completely agree. Tech types do often underestimate the importance of sales. They have a "if you build it they will come" mentality. But as two counter points... - I've seen business people make this same mistake. Although probably not as much. - A technical CEO can hire and manage a non-technical hire (sales person) just as well if not probably better than a non-technical CEO can hire engineers. As a technical CEO/CTO myself I recommend that one of your first hires when the project nears launch should be a sales person. If you wait until the project has already launched you're late and you will burn through capital while they ramp up and build a pipeline.
- Yizahi 9y agoThese equity tables really motivate me about startups. Motivate me to treat them as gamedev studios - meaning stay as far away as possible.