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CTO Guide Series

leadership management security

When a startup is formed, we typically assign the most senior founding engineer the title of CTO. In some cases, this is a serial founder with at least a decade of experience taking an idea and building the scalable systems needed to bring it to life. They’ve managed teams, budgets, and a roadmap before… so this is just another day at the office to them. I’m thinking about people like Rands who take the profession of leadership so seriously that they’ve written multiple books on the subject.

This series isn't for them (though, it would be really cool if they read and and think "Domko gets it")... This series is for the young technical founder who in the near future will be surrounded by crusty SREs and salty TypeScript developers that depend on them to handle "everything technology related that isn't ~write this code~". The things we discuss will generally be adjacent to the core technology your team is buiding. It's these little unloved areas that often de-rail a successful team, and there is no book that I'm aware of that teaches you:

  1. That these problems will exist
  2. A potential way to solve them

Solving these problems won’t help you raise your next round, and they won’t directly impact your customer experience… but they are problems that become harder to solve over time. Making a deliberate effort to solve them early will give you more time to focus on delighting customers in the future. I don’t have a time machine, so the best I can do when I think “I wish we had solved this problem earlier”, is write it down so other people can dodge the potholes that I drove through.

Blog Fodder

Below is a list of the topics I plan to cover initially - you can check back here later for links to the finished content

  • Infra As Code - The greatest gift you can give your future SRE and Security teams

    • Cloud Acount Management
    • CI Pipelines
    • Guardrails

  • Patterns for Version Control System Management

    • Practical advice for configuring your Github tenant
    • Self-Hosted vs SaaS runners
    • Identity Management

  • Corporate Devices - Why you should get company laptops ASAP

    • (and why they should be Macs)

  • Identity Management - Rules for Google Workspace that save you money and protect your company

  • Tech Budgeting and 3rd Party Software

    • What you should track
    • How to manage costs
    • Common negotiation terms and opportunities

  • Basic Agile Processes

    • Why a company of 4 should still use SCRUM
    • Examples and Templates for short/mid/long term planning

  • Identifying and Maturing your Corporate Culture

    • Intentional decisions and word choice to support an awesome team