Founder issues are the #1 reason for companies to fail. And mismatched founders are very common. Especially with inexperienced founders. And with startup accele

Founder issues are the #1 reason for companies to fail. And mismatched founders are very common. Especially with inexperienced founders. And with startup accelerators being biased to young and inexperienced founders, you can blindly assume this to be the case for most startups in such programs. From reading your comment, my conclusion is that you are not a CTO but a lead engineer employed by your two co-founders. This company is probably going to fail and it isn't your fault necessarily. Or very fixable. If your CEO can't delegate things he's not good at that you are supposed to do, that means either you are the wrong person for the job or they are. It's that simple. Figure out which it is. And have that conversation with them ASAP and not in two years. It will save both of you lots of time and money. I see this a lot in the startup world: non technical founders involving a CTO because they believe they need a tech person to take care of the pesky tech thingies they don't understand. Tragically, a lot of companies end up picking the wrong person for this job because they simply lack the capability/judgment of picking the right person. And a lot of would be CTOs end up wasting a lot of time dealing with a rudderless co-founders and companies that they are not actually empowered to fix. Such companies founding with a CTO is a ticket for disaster. Either you are a tech startup in which case the CTO should be the main founder of the company and the largest shareholder that has the final say in what the product is and does. The CTO should be seeking out a good CEO/CRO to manage the business side. Not the other way around. Classic example here is Google with effectively two founder CTOs eventually getting Eric Schmidt to lead the business. Worked out great. Mark Zuckerberg maybe should have done the same thing with Facebook. Alternatively, you are some kind of non technical company where tech just is a means to an end (we need a website, an app, and a thingy and some hand wavy slide compatible aspirational buzzwords). That's completely valid of course. Such companies need technical and operational leadership and managers but these aren't founders necessarily. Amazon is the classic example here. Jeff Bezos was the business guy building a market place. Involved lots of tech of course. But in the end it was a simple (ugly) website and logistics operation. AWS bootstrapped much later out of that. The right person to get would be somebody that can execute and lead. Somebody like Werner Vogels who wasn't a co-founder of Amazon. And the reality is that you end up replacing some of these people over time as well. Early engineering teams with 2 or 3 people are very different from later stage companies. I actually get the question if I know a decent CTO a lot from would be founders. My standard answer is: you don't need one and you should avoid getting one. I always recommend other founders to look for a good VP of engineering instead but not immmediately and maybe start with just a few good engineers and a project/product manager. Maybe one of the existing people can step up in an interim role. Don't slap the CTO title on anyone unless you really need one. And if you do, make sure the equity is appropriate and plan for that person to leave or disappear at some point. The person that does your app and website initially is unlikely to be your long term dream CTO.