elwatto

nah. focus on building cool things people want.

I wouldn’t have had 400M. But I am fine.

Not at all, we believe the asset is worth a lot more :)

Check out the earlier posts in the series. They’re probably more relevant for that stage. What I’ve learned over the years is that the CTO role varies a lot depending on the company and personal context. I just tried to share my journey.

Maybe we are wired differently, but as I wrote in the final part, I’m actually more motivated and see myself going much longer (which is what investors want, as long as there’s growth). It’s linked in the post, but a big part of the round was secondary, which helped reduce financial stress for founders and early employees.

Thanks for your message and point of view. You’re probably the only person here who has been presented with a similar scenario, and this is exactly how I felt.

I won’t disclose details out of respect for the other party, but no, not necessarily. As I wrote, it was a good deal for the founders and some investors, but not for everyone, including employees. There are many ways to structure a sale, and unfortunately not all of them split the cake equally.

Hard disagree. Culture isn’t the problem, org structure is. You can call it an experiment or even a hack. Every team is already innovating within their scope, and splitting becomes easier as that scope grows.

What is too much is asking an Engineering Manager to start a completely independent product line that may go nowhere. It’s far more effective to rely on senior, staff+ engineers who don’t need management and have experience taking things from 0 to 1. They can build an MVP quick. Once we see real signals of PMF, we can then build a team around it (or drop it)

That was the whole point of writing this series: to show how my role evolves and what I’ve had to give up. Trust me, if it were up to me, I’d still be having fun coding (even more so these days). There’s an entire section on delegation in this year’s post.

I’m not the single DRI for culture at all. We have many strong culture carriers, which has made scaling to 100 people much easier than scaling to 20. That said, culture is still one of the core responsibilities of founders, in my opinion.

Also, OCTO isn’t about me wanting to innovate. It’s about giving certain engineers permission to not be tied to a roadmap and to stay fluid.

Agreed on having the flexibility. I think that's the key, the self awareness and ability to adapt. I don't think having CEO/CTO/CMO for founders is a bad idea though. Even at Cloudflare, CEO and COO were co-founders. I am more curious about what it takes to grow from a founder CTO to a public company CTO, same way than other founder roles can. Or maybe it's just too hard.

Anyway, I am flexible John! Totally onboard to give up my title if you are interested to come over and help us RevenueCat go public ;)

Hi! I could tell you that we were visionaries and we knew a pandemic was going to come, so we were super prepared, but that would not be true.

In the early days, Jacob and I discussed a lot whether we wanted to be a remote company or not. We were very attracted to the idea, and firmly believed it was the future. But as you mentioned, we were concerned about the ability to move fast and setting the culture. The first employees we hired from our network were actually based in SF, so it was not a problem.

One of the early employees wanted to move back to his hometown, and we started to move to a more remote first environment (eg more async comms, everyone using their own cam for meetings even if they were in the office, etc). We hired our first engineer remotely (who we had the pleasure to work with in the past) and we never looked back.

It's been challenging (communication, compliance,...). But overall, we are super happy. I have a strong network in Spain and the UK, and we have access to world class talent that do not necessarily want/can live in the Bay Area. Also no immigration issues!

Even Jacob, my co-founder and CEO left the Bay Area. Being prepared was extremely helpful when the pandemic hit, since most processes were already in place.

Important note, we DID NOT do it for financial reasons. We pay same salary (based on SF) no matter where you live in the world.

Hi, author here. I would probably agree with that. We only managed to go that far because the first engineers were quite experienced and super proactive. We also had a PM (essentially part time, since he was in charge of other areas too) and the CEO giving a lot of product direction.

It would have been really hard to do with more junior people (or contractors) without process. We are in a better place now, and planning to start hiring more junior people next year. I think without the correct support structure and process in place, we would have done a disservice to jr engineers. It's part of my focus now, though.