You won’t find me in a hoodie or skateboarding my way to work. Neither do I have a standing desk with four monitors and a neon sign that says “#buildinpublic.” I’m just a guy who’s trying to teach from collapsing long enough for the company to survive.

I’m the CTO of a VC-backed startup in Silicon Valley. We raised a flashy Series A last year. TechCrunch did a piece on us. One of our investors said that we were the future of “Generative AI”. And internally, we were ducting and taping microservices together, hoping the load balance wouldn’t fail again.

Most people think the CTO is the wizard behind the curtain. The truth is, I’m the janitor. I clean up messes. Broken deployments, late-night outages, mysterious performance drops, engineers burning out, PMs promising things we can’t build yet, I’m the one sweeping the glass.

There’s a myth in startup land that “you just need to hire the right people.” Yeah, good luck. The best engineers have 10 competing offers. Those who join us either believe in the mission, want a shot at equity upside, or are simply tired of working on another A/B test at a mega Corp.
And once they’re in? You’d better fight to keep them because every company is dangling $300k TC and remote perks like candy.

The hardest part along the way isn’t tech. It’s important to maintain morale when production slows down—smiling through investor meetings while silently noting eight unhandled exceptions in the logs. It’s trying to convince the team we’re still on track, even if you’re not sure what the track is anymore.

But.
When a customer tells us we saved them hours of work. When a feature ships and works, I see junior developers grow into leaders. That’s the payoff. That’s what keeps me in the game.

Startups will break you before they make you. You’ll question your competence. You’ll dream of stability. You’ll likely fantasize about quitting and returning to IC work.

But if you can hang on, if you can lead through the mess, you’ll help build something that didn’t exist before.
And there’s nothing quite like that.