Based on what you wrote, it doesn't sound like you have confidence in your potential cofounder or the value they might bring to the table. I think this partners

Based on what you wrote, it doesn't sound like you have confidence in your potential cofounder or the value they might bring to the table. I think this partnership is not likely to work out - not because of the CEO's deficiencies (however real they might be), but because you're starting out a very critical relationship with an adversarial attitude. Secondly, while a CTO should indeed be very technically involved at the early stages, it is a business role at the end of the day. Your goal is to build a healthy business, not code up the cleanest architecture or deliver the most beautiful product (though you'll probably need to do these as well). As a cofounder, you will be dealing with customers, with risk mitigation, with all sorts of things that are only tangentially related to technology. This attitude of "value comes from software" is something I see often from engineers, who miss the fact that code is a means to an end. There is a lot more to a successful business than writing code. To answer your question, I do think that you're likely to encounter friction with other senior/executive leadership as long as that is your worldview. Might be worth reading The Founder's Dilemmas by Noam Wasserman. He covers the topic of cofounding with others, and also talks about optimizing for control vs money (spoiler, if you go for the former, you will likely have a lot less of the latter).