I’m writing this on a Sunday morning from my apartment in SoMa, coffee in hand, code pushed but not yet reviewed. I won’t tell you my name or my company — not because it’s stealth, but because, in this town, everyone’s in the same boat and honestly, anonymity feels rare and precious. I’m the CTO of a Series B startup — enterprise SaaS, not that it matters — and most of what I do these days isn’t glamorous, and it isn’t coding.
When I first took this job, I imagined myself as the tech visionary. Architecting beautiful systems. Building scalable infrastructure. Mentoring brilliant engineers. The reality? I spend 60% of my week in meetings — investor updates, strategy calls, hiring panels, board decks. Another 20% goes to firefighting: outages, customer escalations, that one mystery bug no one can reproduce except the biggest client (of course). The rest — if I’m lucky — I get to write some code or review a critical PR.
The thing no one tells you: being a startup CTO is equal parts technology, psychology, and politics. Half the challenge is aligning the team — making sure the engineers, PMs, designers, and execs are on the same page. The other half is protecting them — from scope creep, from unrealistic timelines, from sudden investor demands. The emotional labor is constant. People join startups because they want impact. They stay (or burn out) based on culture.
Hiring is brutal. Good engineers are flooded with offers. We compete with the Big 5, with AI darlings flush with Series C cash, with startups promising the next billion-dollar exit. I’ve lost count of how many times a candidate ghosted us after a final round because someone dangled a $100k signing bonus elsewhere. It’s the game we play.
And then there’s tech debt — the silent killer. When you’re racing to build MVPs, close deals, impress VCs, debt piles up. You tell yourself, “We’ll clean it up after the next round.” But after the next round, it’s “Just one more big feature.” Before you know it, your engineers are spending 50% of their time untangling old decisions.
Would I trade it? Not yet. Because when we ship something that changes how our customers work — when that email comes in from a user saying, “This just saved me hours” — it’s still worth it. That’s the drug of startups: the hit of building something real.
And with that, back to my code. The sprint starts tomorrow.
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