April 30, 2026 · 2 min read
I led my startup from the start (~4 people) to a Series A stage with a 13-person engineering team in under a year. Although my title is officially "Chief Technology Officer," its meaning has changed significantly since the beginning of Clover.
For the first four months, my time was 80% IC (individual contributor) work, but it quickly shifted to 50/50. As I became a more effective PM (product manager), I was able to return to the 80% IC mark. By month 8, we went on a huge hiring sprint and over 30% of my time was spent recruiting. Today, at the one-year mark, my work varies a lot. Some weeks I'm 80% IC, others I'm 80% management. I even had a week where I was the VP of Finance while we switched CFOs. It was fun for a bit, but I look forward to not doing that again.
The engineering-specific work has changed quite a bit too. Early on I did a lot of full-stack work. Today, most of my IC work is spent building infrastructure. My management work went from scheduling tickets to mentoring the people on my team. I'm sometimes called in to help resolve massive merge conflicts and that's such a cool full-circle moment. I remember only a few years ago watching senior engineers fix git issues on a screen share. Now I'm that engineer.
I put "senior" in quotes because although I complete senior-level tasks, I'm not sure I'm fully there yet at least not by SF standards. A senior engineer in Canada could very well be a high intermediate in Silicon Valley. The gap is genuinely that wide.
So what exactly is my job? It changes from day to day. What I've learned is that a good CTO is a combination of: a good engineer (75th percentile amongst peers), a good PM, a respectable mentor AND manager, a people person, and a decent operator (someone who can step into the CEO role for short stretches when needed