In the end it's just a title and we all take those titles with a grain of salt when it comes to startups anyway, right? The original purpose of those titles was

In the end it's just a title and we all take those titles with a grain of salt when it comes to startups anyway, right? The original purpose of those titles was for official company contracts anyway, so everybody involved (investors, stakeholders, clients) knows what's up and I agree that possibly 10 or 20 years ago being CEO or CTO had a stronger load in popular language. The fact that it's so easy to start a company anno 2013 makes the use of them way more common. From a practical point of view, CTO is also shorter than "Technical founder".