tech-company, growth, ctoSo I am a founder of tech startup and I’ve been maintaining the technology that enables operation from the very beginning. I have designed and written all the tech mostly by myself and I remain the only one who fully understands the tech we are using. I have several devs but they mostly do coding/bugfixing without deep understanding.
Now we have some traction, some clients and a lot of management mess to do. The time has come to cope with the technological debt and I have the dilemma:
Do I better hire a PM/CTO and do core tech management myself or do I better hire a chief developer and become PM/CTO myself at this stage when enabling technology code re-write is required?
Take the example of Yahoo. The 2 founders were never in a leadership position except when they were still in the garage back in 1995. They hired a CEO when they were starting to blow up, and they stuck to what they knew best, coding. They were comfortable to let someone else take over and make the big decisions, while they could do what they knew best. Their first CEO took the company from a garage startup to a multi-million dollar business. Since then Yahoo had a half a dozen CEOs but even so after 10 years they were still pushing code at the company and reaping in the millions.
The key takeaway from here is that if you hire a CEO you should definitely hire someone with experience. Someone who immediately knows what he has to do if you show him what you’re doing.
If technology is your core strength then you should probably stick to it. Maybe find a cofounder interested in the Sales & Marketing side rather than hiring.
Have a look at this article that discusses the ideal balance of attributes of a startup team: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andyellwood/2012/08/22/the-dream-team-hipster-hacker-and-hustler/ it sounds like you are the ‘hacker’ and you need a ‘hustler’.
Also don’t the need to keep track of the metrics side of things: designing and executing experiments and honestly keeping track of how well you are doing.
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