Day in the life of
CTO – Neil Parker
A typical day begins with emails. It may not sound too exciting yet, but as the CTO, you’ll occasionally receive emails that truly shouldn’t be delayed. So the first thing to do in the morning is to get a handle on these.
After the emails, there are a few daily meetings. We try to keep these meetings short and few in number, but it’s still important that I talk with the CEO each day about the company. It’s not only important that we’re on the same page but also important that we agree on the vision of the company. And it may sound daunting to talk to the CEO everyday, but when you’re the CTO these conversations are actually quite casual and often give rise to many creative ideas that we’ll later try! Afterwards, I’ll also talk with my direct reports just to go over status updates and address any issues on the horizon.
Lovecast app
Moving to lunch time, I’ll try to find time to eat, but it can be hard! Everyone wants some of your time and often you’ll have to sacrifice the normal eating hours. I’ll still do my best to eat something healthy as I jump from one thing to another (and at a somewhat reasonable time if possible!).
And while I may get quite busy, I actually still try to find time to plan, design systems, review designs/code, and sometimes even write a little code myself. At our company’s current scale, I still have enough time to do these tasks (I’m actually pretty grateful for that — so I’ll cherish it while I can). But out of all of these, planning and reviewing works are the most important. There simply comes a point where you as a single person can’t humanly be the entire technical team. Instead, you’ll have to plan out projects and break them into tasks for others. And reviewing the work is just as important. After all, you need a bug-free system to run a reliable business.
Finally, even at the end of a day, a CTO can never truly rest. I’m always the last defense for any issues that might occur. Luckily, these are quite rare (it’s why we emphasize reviewing the code after all)! But at the same time, I have to make sure that I’m always able to quickly respond to any arising issues (including the weekends).
Work from home setup
Pros
The biggest upside with being a CTO is the freedom that you are given. Not only do you get to decide major technical decisions, but you have a huge influence in the overall direction of the company. This certainly isn’t something you have in a bigger company!
Cons
However, freedom does come with a price. Namely, being a CTO is a huge responsibility with no small amount of pressure. At the end of the day, if you’re running a tech company, then the company rests upon your shoulders. You may of course have a talented tech team behind you, but at the end of the day, it’s your personal duty to ensure that the company can continue to function.
And although the work can be relentless, I personally find myself happier than when I was employed at large tech companies. Just knowing that what I’m building is what I want to build makes all the difference in the world.
Advice to aspiring CTOs
For students, I would suggest just getting the widest breadth of knowledge possible. You’ll want to know how to do everything tech-wise, from building websites to deploying servers. Partially because you’ll be doing this yourself at first, but also because one day you’ll hopefully be managing people that do those things for you.
And if you’re co-founding, don’t stop at the tech. Learn the business side of things. Understand the marketing, the legal aspects, and anything else relevant to the business area you want to enter.
Pulling off a successful startup on your own (particularly your first one) is near impossible without a good team. Do your best to find a co-founder that you can trust and that has the same drive that you do. You want to make sure that you both can rely on each other to constantly improve the company.
