What you don’t want to do is confuse the CTO role with the VP of Engineering role. The CTO role typically shows up earlier – in technology startups, the CTO is frequently one of the co-founders. By contrast, the VP of Engineering is a special role that makes sense as the technical team starts to scale. Read this article for an analysis of the two very different roles - and explore when each role makes sense as a startup grows and scales.
This article builds on content developed by the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship for MIT's Orbit Knowledgebase and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.