We never made any money, and I was the only permanent technical staff (but also technically the CTO) but we had some amazeballs clients - Samsung, Siemens, Tesco, RIM (while they were still cool), and so on.
When we stopped being able to pay me a salary, I turned it in to a real CTO job at a 150 person software company. Our client list gave some real credibility there, as did being able to talk a good talk and looking presentable in a suit.
I suspect this was a phenomenal career move: the previous startup CTO stuff, and any future small-company CTO stuff will be "real" in the eyes of recruiters because I've also managed a big team, budgets, etc - the "real CTO" role validates all the hacking code at smaller companies while claiming to be CTO.
I think there can be a credibility gap for a 30 year old team leader at a profitless company calling themselves a CTO, but having also done a more traditional CTO role at a bigger company allows you to regain that credibility. I can talk confidently about CapEx, OpEx, I've been through a rubber-glove-type due diligence process, been deeply involved in high-level strategy ... I feel like I could spend the next ten years doing 3 people startups again, but then walk in to another "big" CTO role if it didn't work out because of this.
Anyway, ultimately that wasn't what I wanted to do, as much as it was incredible experience. So the wife and I packed off to somewhere warm and cheap, she has a job that pays the bills and for the flat. I'm keeping myself busy by running a one-person R&D lab for a large listed company whose industry I have domain knowledge in, finishing my dissertation, and I've branched in to staffing because it's amazing how much quick cash you can make by messaging ex-coworkers on Facebook (and if you're a Perl developer in the UK: http://perl.careers/)
Because there are so few 150 person companies, most CTO jobs are for small companies.
This doesn't make them any less of a CTO job. In fact, the hard decisions for a CTO are often going to be at the start. Choosing the stack, building the initial team and engineering culture...
When we stopped being able to pay me a salary, I turned it in to a real CTO job at a 150 person software company. Our client list gave some real credibility there, as did being able to talk a good talk and looking presentable in a suit.
I suspect this was a phenomenal career move: the previous startup CTO stuff, and any future small-company CTO stuff will be "real" in the eyes of recruiters because I've also managed a big team, budgets, etc - the "real CTO" role validates all the hacking code at smaller companies while claiming to be CTO.
I think there can be a credibility gap for a 30 year old team leader at a profitless company calling themselves a CTO, but having also done a more traditional CTO role at a bigger company allows you to regain that credibility. I can talk confidently about CapEx, OpEx, I've been through a rubber-glove-type due diligence process, been deeply involved in high-level strategy ... I feel like I could spend the next ten years doing 3 people startups again, but then walk in to another "big" CTO role if it didn't work out because of this.
Anyway, ultimately that wasn't what I wanted to do, as much as it was incredible experience. So the wife and I packed off to somewhere warm and cheap, she has a job that pays the bills and for the flat. I'm keeping myself busy by running a one-person R&D lab for a large listed company whose industry I have domain knowledge in, finishing my dissertation, and I've branched in to staffing because it's amazing how much quick cash you can make by messaging ex-coworkers on Facebook (and if you're a Perl developer in the UK: http://perl.careers/)