OK, you're a CTO now... What did you get yourself into? Founder Fuel Fall 2011 by Sylvain Carle CTO and co-founder at Needium @froginthevalley to /quote me [ these slides are so undesigned, but I guess it makes a point ] CC-BY-SA - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
OK, you're a CTO now... What did you get yourself into?
Mentor Talk @ Founder Fuel Fall 2011.
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OK, you're a CTO now...What did you get yourself into?
Founder Fuel Fall 2011by Sylvain Carle
CTO and co-founder at Needium@froginthevalley to /quote me
[ these slides are so undesigned, but I guess it makes a point ]
★Time to THINK. Time to get things DONE. Time to DO.
Mindset★Be honest with yourself and your
family and friends
★Be megalomaniac with your market and product BUT humble with your team
★Take time OFF. Fully & Partially.
Tools to get things done★Email: short, one topic, @next
★ToDo list: text file accesible from everywhere (dropbox + editors)
★Google Apps: share more, re-use
★Redmine: roadmap, tickets
★Github: code
What it really means★ http://www.scottporad.com/2010/11/12/what-it-really-means-to-be-a-cto/
★ He told me that when the CEO, Ben Huh, hired him on, the site was a mess. The complex process of processing user submitted content was managed entirely by a thorny tangle of PHP (in WordPress) and .NET. This weird mix of ugliness was written by a contractor over the course of the preceeding six months. It was undocumented and messy. The obvious thing to do was get rid of it, and start fresh.
★ So, he sat down and talked to the CEO. Times were tight: they’d raised a small round to acquire the original domain and hire some staff, but the money was disappearing quickly. New features were needed to support better monetization, and they couldn’t get them done frequently enough.
★ Scott had a terrible decision to make. He could scrap six person-months of work and build the site anew. It would scale better, reducing costs would be easier, and he wouldn’t have to mix PHP and .NET. They could purge their technical debt with one fell swoop.
★ But, that’s not what he did. He told me that he wasn’t sure the company could survive locking down the business while he attended to development housecleaning. So, he kept the company on the original codebase, platform, and architecture.
Conclusion★Market, Product, Team, Model
★Architect the Business
★Decide: kayaking metaphor
★Makings things happen is not the same as doing them yourself