> However, I have to admit, I can't immediately list a ton of technical founders I've met who'd be happy to be called VP of Engineering rather than CTO. How I

> However, I have to admit, I can't immediately list a ton of technical founders I've met who'd be happy to be called VP of Engineering rather than CTO. How I might explain this to a very technically-inclined audience (the way I would explain this to an executive would be "lay out the management realities of what is expected of a CTO", then sit back and wait for any follow up questions). It may depend upon how you sell the CTO role. If you get board backing, then the technically-inclined will tend to sort themselves out if you present the CTO role evolving into one that needs someone who no longer codes 20% of the time, but instead only in their limited personal time. Instead, the role evolves into one more akin to a sell-side investment banker, with lots of communicating between lots of different stakeholders. Endless PowerPoints, traveling road shows to meet investors, if you haven't learned yet then taking etiquette classes so you can concentrate on the conversation around the table instead of stressing over being the only one to not know what they're doing at a table in a Michelin starred establishment, prepping your tech teams on how to present to due diligence teams at customers and investors, meeting with tech teams to get high-level presentations on product technical direction while translating board and CEO strategy into those teams' terms, meeting with the board and CEO to set strategy, researching and talking with analysts about industry direction before deciding what you believe that direction will be and defending your analysis, hashing over the same topics with the board and CEO and other C-levels in a nearly infinite number of permutations, learning golf if you have to, learning how to socialize from actual professional trainers if you have to, "have to" defined by the board and investors on any number of other areas, learn how to read and parse financial statements if you haven't already, hashing out share dilution events between C-levels and your technical teams, setting leadership examples for your technical teams, mediating between engineering/technical department heads if you're in a small enough company, recruiting for such department heads, working with a mentor on how to distill and package complex technical details into salient and succinct framing for leadership, take lessons from PR professionals on talking with the media, and on, and on, and on. Faced with such hardcore managerial demands acting as a translating layer between the technical and investor/C-level layers, and clear expectations that the board and investors want someone who dives into them without a backward glance at firing up Emacs in Javascript mode at work, most sane early founder CTO's who love the technology for its own sake would leap at the opportunity to take the reins of a VP/EVP/SVP type role depending upon the size of the company, where there is a clear expectation they would still be doing some pull requests, pair programming, etc.