Harnessing Experience at a Fraction of the Cost

As a startup, one of the most important decisions you can make is ensuring you have access to experienced technical leadership. While hiring a full-time CTO can be expensive, there’s a better alternative than going it alone: the fractional CTO.

Five Years of Giving Dangerously

Who Cares if it Scales?

My answer: “Who cares?”

Startups: You Don’t Need a CTO (Yet)

We’ve all heard the story: two brilliant founders have an idea that will change the world. They gather a dedicated group of early employees/stock option holders around them and, through sheer grit, determination, and HUSTLE, they disrupt an industry and become billionaires in the process. The moral of the story: anyone with a good idea and the willingness to sacrifice everything on the altar of Hustle can become a success.

Except… that isn’t really true, is it? Every year, hundreds of thousands of technology startups fail, and of those that survive only a tiny percentage ever reach unicorn status. And those hustle-filled origin stories? Well, they’re not 100% factual, either: multiple studies and books have shown that luck plays a significant role in every company’s success.

We want to believe that our efforts matter, so it’s tempting to accept the lie that the harder we work the more our success is assured. The problem for a startup team is that the idea that they can win by hustling harder than the big guys is mathematically false. 100 Amazon employees, even giving a half-assed effort, are going to put out more work than the 20 “hustlers” at TinyCo.

The Hustle Myth

The Hustle Myth has weaponized deeply ingrained elements of American culture… to the point that the only measure of a human is how hard they work.

The problem with the Hustle Myth, though, is that it glorifies one element of the story and ignores the rest. It’s bad enough when founders fall prey to the Hustle Myth and work themselves into the ground.

Action Steps

First, don’t buy into the Hustle Myth and don’t peddle that poison to your team.

• Stop saying, “We’ll win because we want it more than they do!” and start saying, “We’ll win because we understand our market better than anyone else and we know where the pressure points are.”
• Stop glamorizing late nights and 24-hour Slack debates and start making room for rest and refreshment. Value outcomes over effort and quality over quantity.

Next, stop hustling and start thinking.

• What’s the highest and best use of your company’s time today?
• Where is your company going? Is that dream still alive, and is it the right one?
• How do you respond when things go wrong? What metrics will you use to validate or invalidate a decision?

Finally, recognize that we work better when work isn’t the only thing we do.

When we stop living an adrenaline-soaked, lizard-brained, Hustle-bound existence, we’ll build better companies.

Just over a year ago, I embarked on a crazy experiment: I wanted to see if I could make a living by giving.

We can do better at this. We need to do better, by recognizing our shortcomings and refusing to let our enthusiasm overshadow our better judgment. We need to recognize that, in this case, passion and ingenuity aren’t enough. They need to be accompanied by vision, focus, and empathy.