I've seen extremely sales / marketing oriented CTOs that worked well despite having not much / very outdated tech skills. It usually works pretty well when you

I've seen extremely sales / marketing oriented CTOs that worked well despite having not much / very outdated tech skills. It usually works pretty well when you have a lot of enterprise sales, and the CTO is often there to help get through procurement, relay technical requirements from sales calls, bizdevvy stuff re: integrations / platform, etc. Every time I've seen that pattern work though, it's been paired with a very effective VP Eng, and quite a lot of autonomy on teams owing to the lack of a technical vision, or at least a technical vision that can be directly implemented (i.e. the CTO might have vague directional goals, but there's a lot of legwork required to turn that into something real).