The Failing CTO - What we can learn from others' mistakes
summary
Startling industry stats: 29% fail from running out of cash, 23% from the wrong team, 19% from being outcompeted, and the top cause is no market need. Case studies include an ecommerce platform stuck on 20 EC2 instances with ~200 apps and 60 services paying ~£300,000/year to keep running and stabilised iteratively over 12 months; an analytics product crippled by Next.js Apollo with graphql pre-1.0 forcing DB rebuilds that gets fixed in three months by switching to REST + SQL and Looker dashboards; and an events business that spends ~100K to build an Android app and NFC workflow, cutting staffing from 5–10 to 2 and recouping costs in four months.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Introduction and background
- 2:27Why discuss failing CTOs
- 3:09Story one: Sports for You
- 8:07Story two: Investment Forwards
- 14:48Story three: Events for Me
- 17:34Key takeaways and advice
- 20:43Q&A session
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