Unicorn s Baby Steps: What Should You Know & Do As a First Time Startup CTO
summary
Advice targets first-time startup CTOs with concrete tactics: build the smallest thing that proves your competitive edge (example: MidJourney skips a website and uses a Discord bot MVP), classify choices as one-way vs two-way door decisions to spend time wisely, expect outages to break users’ businesses (beauty/wellness SaaS downtime taught that lesson), measure development agility as time to deploy one atomic change, hire a head of developer experience around ~70 engineers, and treat technical debt as a contained, intentional tool.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Introduction to startups
- 3:59What defines a startup
- 11:06Building the product
- 22:04Running in production
- 33:44Scaling the organization
- 42:14Startup DNA and culture
- 48:33Five common mistakes
- 52:02Final advice for startup CTOs
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