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Hiring Developers Before Product/Market Fit?

SoCal CTO

Using my StartupRoar as a radar, I came across a great post by Gabriel Weinberg Do you really need a full-time hire for that? Hiring seems to be the preferred use of seed funds (by investors and founders), whereas I'd prefer a focus on customer acquisition. The startup founder is definitely not ready to hire a CTO.

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Startup CTO or Developer

SoCal CTO

I’ve been having discussions with several people recently about the role of the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) in very early stage companies. In December 2007, I described how I commonly take on an Acting CTO Role in a Start-up. I used an image from Roger Smith that describes the varying roles of a CTO as the company matures.

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Startups and a Common Misunderstanding in Agile Software Development

SoCal CTO

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. In three of the cases, the founder was finding that the software teams (1 in-house, 2 outsourced) were delivering relatively well in the short-run. My belief is that you shouldn't sign that contract.

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The Power of “In Person” – Why Distributed Teams are Less Effective

Both Sides of the Table

Those cultural normals are established through human connections: the night we all stayed late to get that release out the door, the day we celebrated our funding round or the day we landed our first big account. CEO, VP Products and CTO must all be in the physical location. If they’re not I won’t fund.

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Technology Roles in Startups

SoCal CTO

Background This post partly really came about as a result of a great conversation yesterday with David Croslin a former CTO at HP who recently conducted an interesting experiment. This is actually fairly common and I think it’s a bit challenging in that the technology roles (from technology advisor to CTO) in a startup vary widely.

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Kareo: Bringing The Power Of the Cloud to Small Medical Practices

socalTECH

We also have a cloud-baesd, billing and practice management solutions, which enables them to manage all of their internal financial processes, and we also have solutions for billing and cloud-based outsourcing of back office tasks. I founded that with the former CTO of my first company, Kevin Smilak, who now works at Google.

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Why The Growth Of The Internet Is Driving EdgeCast's Revenues

socalTECH

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. Instead, they outsource to an expert like Edegcast. James Segil: There's a couple of things to consider with growth, around what does it take to fund a company's growth.

CTO Hire 248