Metronome

This past week it seemed like everyone I know was talking about Paul Graham’s Founder Mode essay. I recently transitioned from CTO → CEO and had assumed the strange feeling I had was just ‘being a CEO.’ After reading the blog post, I suspect the feeling is closer to ‘being a founder-CEO.’ Some thoughts on that transition: 🔎 Increasing your breadth but maintaining focus As CTO of Metronome, I was really close to the means of production - reading PRDs, writing PRDs, watching demos, reading code. As I’ve transitioned to CEO, I still want to be deep in the weeds, but I’ve had to let go of R&D a bit, to focus on other parts of the business. At Metronome, this means that I’m really focused on Marketing right now. Constantly assessing and adjusting your focus is a key part of the job. 🚀 Nature abhors a vacuum If you’re doing your job as CTO at an early stage company you’re likely a load bearing beam. You’re shipping code, writing specs, doing design, your job doesn’t change that much so things get built around you. As CEO, your job can shift day-to-day, week-to-week and this can leave little eddies and vacuums as you move around the org. My only advice here is to try to stagger your transition by first transferring out of CTO and then transition in to CEO. 🤑 The buck stops with you CTO is kind of a sweet gig. You get to make lots of fun decisions and steer the product toward the outcome you’ve been dreaming of. Billing is a fractal puzzle, I’m never bored. AND, you get to do all this stuff without needing to run a board. Ultimately, if you mess up bad enough someone else has to help you clean it up. As CEO, you’re literally the last line of defense. Even though I am an equal co-founder, I really under-appreciated the psychological burden of knowing that there is no one there to help pick up your mess. 👁️ All eyes on you CTO is a pretty behind-the-scenes gig. Sure, you might be the life of the party or the star of the back-end show, but almost by definition you’re not the face of the company in public or internally. There’s an old adage that goes like ‘If your boss is smiling, you’re happy.’ Keeping that smile is the CEO’s job. The problem is that things go wrong all the time. Maintaining the cheery disposition and optimism is not always an easy task. Perhaps the power posers were on to something. 💚 1 is the loneliest number Before you become CEO, you have some notion of ‘peers’. They may report to you, but you can still kvetch about the boss. When you become the boss, all those former peers now report to you and the community disappears. The best advice I’ve gotten is to develop relationships with other CEOs (perhaps more specifically Founder-CEOs, per Paul Graham) to make sure that you have someone you can confide in.