The impact you can make as a CTO is bringing an engineering perspective to the board and keeping engineers happy (either by doing it personally or by delegating

The impact you can make as a CTO is bringing an engineering perspective to the board and keeping engineers happy (either by doing it personally or by delegating to someone else, eg. a VP). Both are important tasks because it's easy for business to start thinking of engineering as just a cost centre (which is the easiest way to make sure your company will never use technology efficiently to multiply its revenue) and because hiring engineers costs can be a significant part of your company spend