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Your Next CTO Should Be an SRE
Startups are fascinating to me for a million different ways. They’re microcosms of technology, leadership, and innovation all mashed together and hyper-focused on a single priority. Everything that you know about working in a traditional corporate setting is both suddenly irrelevant and amplified by 100x at the same time. One of the more fascinating facets of early-stage startups is their leadership and how those early leaders have to evolve over time as the company scales. Startups usually start out with a small 2–3 person team and can very rapidly expand out to 50+ people in a very short period of time. If you thought leadership in a relatively stable organization was challenging enough you should try doing it somewhere where tomorrow you could have ten new people or go bankrupt (or both!).
For me, the fascinating part comes the company grows and products get launched where there’s a turning point in the lifecycle of the organization — and I think it happens earlier than a lot might guess — where your software-engineer-turned-leader (CTO, VP of Engineering, etc.) has a choice to make: start transitioning to a more active leadership role and less of a core code contributor, or double down on the code side of things. In many startups this is a pivotal moment where the fate of the company can be decided but the ramifications won’t be felt for months or even years. In almost every scenario…
