> our CTO was handling everything about AntiMalware. He was the main developer...
There's (one) of your problems. Your CTO (just like managers) should not be coding, they should be defining and leading the technical strategy of the company.
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If you happen to be part of a two person team without any money you're CTO is going to need to code. At a team of 4/5 the handoff begins by employee 11 they shouldn't be coding perhaps firefighting if necessary.
As part of a two person team, there are no CEO/COO/CTO/CFO roles...you're just two people building something.
It's a joke to give yourself a management title when there's nothing to manage.
It's not a management title, it's a role.
Being a 2 people company or a 20k+, you still have to manage financial, technical, operation aspects of your business.
Same role name, different implications depending on scale.
It’s a role (CTO), but not one that exist on a small team.
If you are a small handful of people starting off, you don’t need a CFO, you need a bookkeeper and an accountant. You don’t need a CTO, you need a tech lead.
All that rest is a mix of confusion and puffery.
The puffery is in the inflation of the supposed prestige of such titles (both in puny and large settings).
There's a level of strategy, planning, influence, and execution that is completely missing at the small level - it's not even a matter of scale.
Ignoring that when giving yourself a C-level title is what I take issue with.
You're saying exactly the same thing I'm saying.
Same role name, different situational implications.
Being a mayor of a small village or of Paris or New-York, you're still the mayor.
Seeing CEO on the business cards of single person companies always makes me chuckle.
Depending on what form your business takes and where you file, you may have to designate who the CEO or President is. Of course, you needn't always put that on a business card.
All these CFO,CTO,CEO,CMO and etc. titles make me laugh when it comes to small companies. These titles make sense when we talk about the likes of Google,MS, Facebook. If it's a shop of 10 people, you are not a CTO,you are a tech lead at best with a few less experienced developers.The 2 co-owners of the business I work for call themselves joint CEOs, with only one line of management separating them from the lowest level employees.I could call myself Vice President or COO or something like this but that'd be idiotic knowing that I only manage a team of 10 people.This obsession and vanity with titles is complete nonsense.
Not true. A person can manage maybe 10 other people max. Beyond that, you start delegating.
So really there's no practical difference between a company of 11 people and a company of 11000 people from a management perspective.
The technological/practical concerns you'll be dealing with are totally different, of course, but as far as 'people management' stuff goes, there's little difference.
I agree with the part about the number of people being managed, however usually there's a huge difference in management structure. For instance we have some standard big corp and its tech department. So you'd have a developer,senior developer,tech lead, some sort of team manager.Then the team manager would be reporting to the person that runs the particular division or department. The head of the department would report to some VP who would eventually report to the CTO. In a small company that'd be like developer=> CTO. That "Chief",in which case it loses the purpose.
fancy titles are useful when you are dealing with Big Enterprise Clients. "CTO of TinyStartup" means you get taken slightly more seriously than "some rando building stuff".
In fact, it's not even with the people you're directly dealing with where this becomes useful (as, if you're selling to Big Enterprise Client, you likely have a network inside the company anyhow). It's when the person you have a relationship with has to convince his/her boss to approve an invoice from your little shop.
Have to agree with this. Ever since I got promoted, the way people( outside the company) tend to talk to me has changed a lot.Even though good part of my daily activities are the same, people tend to take me more seriously.It does help to chase people to make sure they do things or even for the customers,who want to talk to 'the manager', even though I'd help as much as any other colleague of mine...
Would you rather buy $100K of software from a "Senior Sales Representative" or a "VP of Sales, Western US region". Titles mean a lot to certain people, even if they are all puffery.
Personally I wouldn't care. The reason is, that regardless of the company I'd go on LinkedIn just to see who the person is. The deciding criteria would not be the sales rep's title.The functionality of the product, support, chances of them staying alive for the next few years and etc. are much more important. However, I appreciate that's not necessarily the case of how a lot of people think.
In a two person company you don't have a CTO and a CEO, you have "The Code Guy/Gal" and "The Other One".
> they should be defining and leading the technical strategy of the company.
At most companies (small to medium and a large number of industries), that isn't a fulltime job. Most companies have IT as support or are a very small segment of the total business.