I have held the CTO title at several start-ups, including VC funded, though not at a HN style web start-up (YMMV). My job, greatly simplified, mostly consisted

I have held the CTO title at several start-ups, including VC funded, though not at a HN style web start-up (YMMV). My job, greatly simplified, mostly consisted of two things: 1) setting the technical vision for the company, and 2) communicating that vision internally and externally. As to 1, it's never consisted of a lot of programming (that's what you hire programmers for), but looking at the hundreds of more or less showstopper technical decisions that have to be made in a company every week, making a decisive decision, and being able to justify & live with it. A CTO has to be experienced, practical and savvy enough to make very hard technical decisions well enough not to screw the company down the road (you decided to go with a vendor that folded: Fail, your back-end architecture won't scale: Fail, etc.). A CTO who jumps on "new and shiny" needs to have a much better explanation than "new and shiny rocks!". As to 2, being able to sell the merits of those decisions is vital. Early in the companies growth, that's making your internal technical folks good with it, even if they think they would have made a different decision (as they often would): why add this feature (or not), why this database instead of that one, why this deployment strategy, why hire that person over another, why allocate resources here and not there, etc. As the company grows (hopefully), I spend more and more time making non-technical and external folks believe in the technical correctness of what we were doing: the sales & marketing team, client prospects, press/media, potential investors, etc. By this point, I really should have turned over most any remaining day-to-day stuff over to operational folks, or I'll become a bottleneck for growth. That said, a lot of start-ups slap a C-title on all sorts of stuff that they shouldn't. C-level is a strategic role, not tactical. Your accountant isn't a CFO, your best programmer isn't (probably) a CTO. The kid who updates the web site and is reading a book on SEO isn't a CMO. This doesn't matter so much early on, but if you ever decide to go the VC route, they tend not to like a C-heavy corporate structure. If nothing else, the VC will want to add strategic heavy hitters, and people tend to get butthurt when their title goes from CTO to Senior Programmer or some such.