CTO in a start-up: Vision and Mission

The moment you learn why not to use single apostrophes for strings

You might be their biggest headache!

You — a young and talented programmer — had probably more than once an idea to create a startup, or to join one at an early stage. Seeing around so many successful companies with a tech product, you could easily develop yourself, making you think you might be the key ingredient to the success of such a venture. Well, you might be… their biggest headache indeed!

This is a very first article from the series of “Why being a CTO in a young startup might be a great — or horrible — idea”. Before you jump into this world, here is my background.

In the last five years I dedicated a large portion of my life developing novel, green algorithms for Machine Learning (http://marieai.com). And even more — time and energy — into something I thought would be “the easy part” — to commercialise it. In five years, I had over a dozen business partners and developed — up to a MVP stage — half a dozen projects. Most of them died or were suspended but all of this gave me an education, I couldn’t acquire otherwise.

After recently abandoning one of such ventures — Hint Technology, established in Stockholm — leaving my great co-founder Maria and our pre-seed VC investor, I have collected a few thoughts on why you might be a good — or a really bad — match for a non-technical founders and the VC ecosystem in general.

Chapter 1: Vision and Mission

We, the tech people, are spoiled a little too much, compared to other professions. We can easily — especially full stack developers — deliver an MVP that can serve the purpose or even make money through bootstrapping efforts. So we see partnership with venture capital differently. We are also more analytical, which makes our visions and the scope we look at others, a little bit different.

You have probably entered — or considering — this glamorous world of start-ups with an idea to build something of value, make a dent in the universe or at least push the boundaries of what’s considered possible or feasible.

Fair point, after all some changes require capital and business muscles to reach the adoption level, required to really make a change. Just like engineers in Adobe, couldn’t dream of so broad adoption of their PDF format without a powerful financial backup of a corporation, their goal to save billions of trees and make office work more productive could be just a peculiar concept.

So you might think, mingling with business people — mainly VC funds — would be the best way to push your vision into the wild and give it the scale, necessary to conquer the world. And you might be:

Right!

1. That’s why venture capital has been established — to harness a potential of new solutions that could reach market adoption relatively fast with a proper rocket fuel (funding). Your vision might become a global standard for solving problems in less than a decade. This is how Slack did it. It’s not the best or even first ICQ-like spinoff but they’ve managed to gain market adoption and the new standard helped remote workers and departments deal with problems faster.

ICQ — Slack before Slack

1. Your vision, with a VC funding boost, might be achievable. It will be remodelled in a business-fashion to fit funding rounds but if you have a bold 10-year-vision and solid understanding of your direction, you might benefit from the partnership.
2. Acquiring talents might be difficult — or impossible — without an external funding and not every vision is feasible for a one-man-army. It’s difficult to attract talented tech people. Have I mentioned we are too spoiled?

Wrong!

1. Sometimes, your vision might simply not hit the right spot on the market. It’s either timing or scale or target audience. Other times conditions might change during the development and you will be forced to adjust your criteria of a “visionary mission” to fit the market or next-round-investors. It might not play well with your ego or long-term goals.
   You probably know Instagram and we can only guess but mine is that their technical co-founder haven’t really dreamed of spending his life on a project that will do a digital make-up for insecure narcissists. Might be worng thou.

Some end up as billionaires, creating digital make-up apps for attention seeking narcissists. You have to choose if that’s your call because VC most likely will take you exactly there.

1. Because you won’t be the only company in VC’s portfolio, for financial analysts you’ll be just another “sausage” in a sausage factory. Your vision might get reduced to just a slightly different flavour. But still appealing to people craving hot dogs. This also might not play well with your ambitions or desire to leave a mark on the this planet.
   Things to mention are:
   One-size-fits-all hiring strategy — that will influence the next decade of people you’ll be surrounded with;
   One-size-fits-all PR and communication — that might shape you just like a geeky sausage advertising mascot;
   I can hear you shiverring…
2. Your vision might be just too novel, too advanced, too unpolished for a — relatively short — decade long plan of global expansion. After all ten years in business is not that much. Especially if you consider beating all competitors, going through several major internal — or external — hurdles and still managing to pull a project, investors or consumers want to invest in a landscape that might be completely different from today. After all — VCs are not your long term partners. Despite what they claim, they might leave you as soon as you prove to be difficult to shape into a new tasty sausage for their hot dog stand menu shifts. It’s understandable and you have to empathise with that — to see from their perspective — before making a decision, costing both parties time and money.

Being a CTO

A role of a CTO is very important for a techcompany, make sure you really fit into this shoes before you tie sholaces.
Next chapter will be about Entreprenourship and how daily business activity can derail your dreams of being a long term CTO — or might inspire you to become one.

About Me

Hi, I’m Marcin. Former game developer and algorithms designer.
Currently working on a novel, general purpose algorithm, you can use offline on any device. My dream is to deliver solution that could be trained, up trained and work as a swarm, solving insanely complex problems.

This is how MarieAI (https://marieai.com/) was born.
Concept of a Digital Hippocampus
Data Layering technique, explained here.

Find me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcin-rybicki-qa/