SoCal CTO

MARCH 3, 2011

I talk to roughly 2 or 3 new startups every week who need advice from an experienced CTO. Generally I can provide quite a bit of help in that brief time. Of course, I provide part-time CTO services. So, I wanted to use this post to make it official - we are offering free startup CTO consulting sessions.

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Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 20, 2010

The terms “CTO&# and “VP Engineering&# have such stigmas associated with what they are that I’m sure some people will feel uncomfortable with the definitions I’ve put forward. I hope many will read this and have an answer for the question, “what’s the different between a CTO and a VP of Engineering?&#.

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SoCal CTO

JANUARY 18, 2011

I received an inquiry from a reader of my blog and thought I would provide some thoughts, but would definitely welcome input: I am an unpaid CTO of a small startup. I have been working full time with two founders for about 10 months on full time basis. Please let this be a lesson to everyone – founders and CTOs.

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SoCal CTO

JANUARY 18, 2011

I received an inquiry from a reader of my blog and thought I would provide some thoughts, but would definitely welcome input: I am an unpaid CTO of a small startup. I have been working full time with two founders for about 10 months on full time basis. Please let this be a lesson to everyone – founders and CTOs.

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SoCal CTO

MARCH 12, 2012

"I'm looking for a partner / cofounder who can not only head the technical aspects and build a working model of the site, but someone with the connections to put a great development team together when we need it. Make sure you go through the 32 Questions Developers May Have Forgot to Ask a Startup Founder. Find out who is good.

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SoCal CTO

MAY 19, 2010

I’m seeing and hearing that it’s becoming tough finding good developers again, at least here in Los Angeles. On Friday, at the LA CTO Forum , I heard from a couple of CTOs having trouble finding good developers. I was wondering, what methods have you found to be successful in finding developers?

Develop 175

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SoCal CTO

SEPTEMBER 27, 2011

For your first key hires, three, five, maybe as much as ten, you will probably not be able to use any kind of formula. For example, suppose you're just two founders and you want to hire an additional hacker who's so good you feel he'll increase the average outcome of the whole company by 20%. n = (1.2 - 1)/1.2 =.167. and we have 11.1%

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Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 16, 2014

Eventually you need a VP of Product to handle your product roadmap, a CTO for engineering leadership and VPs of sales, marketing & biz dev. You hire great people. You course correct. You motivate, cajole, reassign tasks, hire, fire and push the organization forward. Marketing of course often feels the opposite.

Entrepreneur 385

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SoCal CTO

MAY 13, 2014

You can’t afford and don’t want to hire a full-time CTO or architect. While Bob’s post focuses on Technology Advisors and the Startup Founder Developer Gap , we also discussed advisors more broadly. In Bob’s post, he tells startup founders to get smart on product design, software architecture and development process.

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Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 15, 2014

Much has been written about when it is time to hire a “professional CEO” to run a startup company and of course that has long been a norm in Silicon Valley when founders find that their inexperience may be a limiting factor in company growth ( know as the Peter Principle ). and Microsoft had become.

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SoCal CTO

JULY 23, 2012

I seem to encounter a lot of people who want to attach a CTO label to me as I'm the only programmer on the founding team of three. While I do fill that role at the moment, I'm a little hesitant to refer to myself as a CTO as we still haven't launched a product, acquired a single user, or turned or a penny in profit. Accounting?

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Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 21, 2014

The truth is you really don’t know how your teammates or your bosses will perform in good times and bad. You hire people who look good on paper. So one of the surest signs you’ve hired a leader is the willingness of his or her former team to re-assemble. After 6 months – you know. You REALLY know.

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SoCal CTO

APRIL 28, 2014

There was a lot of passion in the room last week when I presented Working with Developers at the Stubbs Precellerator. I guess it should not be a surprise that Founders have lots of challenges working with developers. But my developers want to go into way too much detail. Time Wasters - Don''t talk too much.

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SoCal CTO

FEBRUARY 20, 2007

skip to main | skip to sidebar SoCal CTO Tuesday, February 20, 2007 Innovation and Geography I ran across a post in Read/Write Web - Does Location Matter in Web Innovation? that talked about a recent NY Times article When It Comes to Innovation, Geography Is Destiny. eHarmongy) as an acting CTO.

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socalTECH

MARCH 12, 2013

The Internet doesn't work right, and is broken, and without a CDN, you can't do what you need to do if you're the CTO of a large website. The development community and web developers, who tend to be our customers, like that flexibility, and the quick time to market. Those two areas are a bit of a moving target.

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Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 16, 2016

The major source of output of course has a computer monitor that fortunately takes a lot less desk real estate than it did when I started at my first job in 1991. Of course in recent years voice as I/O is becoming mainstream. The CTO, Tor Ivry , heads engineering out of Israel. These things are knowable using computer vision.

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Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 28, 2011

You want somebody who can raise $15 million to build out your R&D, business development and sales organizations. So yes, I want to hire somebody with really high IQ and EQ but not somebody who is more knowledgeable at your specific skill set than you are. Nah, of course not. How can I hire a team without any money?

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SoCal CTO

JUNE 26, 2012

I've done four Free CTO Consulting Sessions in the past month with startup founders who all had run into variations of the same problem. They didn't feel they had visibility into timelines and costs for development of their software. The teams involved didn't seem to be exhibiting many of the Symptoms of a Weak Development Team.

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Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

Because I am true to the hiring practices I preach, I wanted a strong exec who would “ punch above their weightclass ” by taking a job they hadn’t yet done but would hugely aspire to and thus work harder to out perform. In industry this is known as “yield management” and of course it needs to exist.

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Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 19, 2009

Good entrepreneurs can admit when their course of action was wrong and learn from it. You’re sales person is getting blocked by the CTO who says she shouldn’t go above him but the CTO isn’t approving the deal. But “he didn’t have the budget to hire a developer until he had raised money!&#.

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Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 22, 2012

I think I’ve read Paul Graham’s post on “ Startup = Growth ” three or four times now. And of course on Twitter I’ve seen the Tweets, ReTweets and superlatives on what a great post it is. Ryan Lissack is the CTO of Maker Studios. But 98% of VC exits in our industry are sub $100 million.

Startup 390

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socalTECH

MAY 2, 2017

He's the former CTO at Stocktwits, and he did the analysis and found out a lot of stuff. We all know that you develop better rapport with someone, cement relationships, and have a lot more commitment to someone when we do that. What we've done a lot is really focused on hiring. But we don't usually have data to quantify that.

Sales 145

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socalTECH

OCTOBER 4, 2010

The company provides SAT, ACT, and other similar test preparation courses and related software. We took the recent round, because Jake and I feel very passionately about our social missions, and, about four years ago, we started developing the software to create software. We're at $499, they are at $999. more) READ MORE>>.

Software Review 178

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Alon Schwartz

DECEMBER 14, 2008

I’m being asked this by technologies, of course, but also from other, non-tech people like private investors, VCs, SEO experts, marketing guys, potential hires, partners, and any random guests that just happen to stop by and say hi to Jason (of course…). Thank God my 9 year old son hasn’t asked me that yet…. I rest my case.

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Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 23, 2014

I spent an hour on the phone working with Sam Rosen, the CEO of MakeSpace on a senior exec he is considering hiring. And I spoke with the CTO of another great company I used to be on the board of and enlisted his support in potentially being an advisor to one company. Of course I could go on and on. Roger Ehrenberg. Fred Wilson.

Networking 366

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Alon Schwartz

DECEMBER 14, 2008

I’m being asked this by technologies, of course, but also from other, non-tech people like private investors, VCs, SEO experts, marketing guys, potential hires, partners, and any random guests that just happen to stop by and say hi to Jason (of course…). Thank God my 9 year old son hasn’t asked me that yet…. I rest my case.

LAMP 40

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Alon Schwartz

DECEMBER 14, 2008

I’m being asked this by technologies, of course, but also from other, non-tech people like private investors, VCs, SEO experts, marketing guys, potential hires, partners, and any random guests that just happen to stop by and say hi to Jason (of course…). Thank God my 9 year old son hasn’t asked me that yet…. I rest my case.

PHP 40

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Tech Zulu Event

AUGUST 31, 2011

We also had awesome group of mentors that included: David Waxman (Co-founder of PeoplePC, Spot Runner and Firefly Network), Paige Craig (CEO of BetterWorks ), Josh MacAdam (Co-founder/CTO at Ming.ly If Avesta sees someone drinking Coloft coffee (organic of course), he quickly asks if they’ve sold anything. is also hiring.

Los Angeles 73

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Tech Zulu Event

JUNE 16, 2014

On the day of Miigle’s public launch, we chatted about developing his team, lessons learned, and how World Cup soccer fits into his vision. For example, take someone who is developing a travel solution as a mobile application. How did you identify what you needed, and how did you come to hire the right people?

SoCal 104

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SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

aka: An Open Letter to the Next Big Social Network) - 500 Hats , November 1, 2010 I've held off writing this post for a long time, because I couldn't quite get my head around all the issues. Was it a Startup Founder Developer Gap ? How to Take Down Facebook -- Hint: It Ain't Twitter. It may be that all the doomsayers are right.

Technical Review 175

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Frank Addante

JUNE 4, 2006

► February (1) Building and Developing an A++ Team ► 2008 (14) ► December (1) Develop a Culture Roadmap ► November (2) Green Week - Save the Environment and Your Cash Creating a Culture of Innovation: Cultural Values. Under Process, Over Deliver So, you need to develop a product? Build a SWAT team 3.

Startup 40

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SoCal CTO

OCTOBER 5, 2010

Great content again in September that meets at the intersection of startups, technology, product and being a Startup CTO. 8220; His three things (worth reading his whole post anyway) are set vision/strategy and communicate broadly, recruit/hire/retain top talent, and make sure there’s enough cash in the bank. It’s great advice.

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