He forgot “etc”

Riges Younan recently Twittered about an interesting article by Eric Ries entitled What does a startup CTO actually do? Having been the CTO at a handful of startups – and it’s what I’m doing now – I can say the list is pretty much spot on, with just one exception: etc . Et cetera is all the other stuff that needs to be done, but no one’s been hired to do it yet.

Usually a startup has one or two people (including the “CTO”) in the technical department. As tasks get too big or too complicated for the CTO to do by themselves, they need go and find someone to do them. Hopefully, this search is planned for, and there’s budget for it. Having a CTO that does too much “etc”, makes for an unhappy and unproductive CTO, and the company as a whole suffers because of it.