Author: paula

Some days I wonder why I ever took this job. I used to be an engineer. You know — headphones on, solving hard problems, in flow for hours. These days, as CTO of a mid-stage Silicon Valley startup, my calendar looks like a Tetris game of meetings, and the last time I spent a whole afternoon writing code… well, let’s just say I had more hair back then.

Let me paint you a picture. We’re a team of about 80 now — 25 engineers, 5 product managers, a couple of designers, the usual growing pains. We’ve raised a solid Series B. Revenue’s coming in. The board’s impatient. And suddenly, everyone’s looking at me to “scale the team,” “harden the platform,” “accelerate velocity.”

Here’s what that actually looks like:

• Hiring is a full-time job in itself. Finding good engineers is tough. Finding good startup engineers — people who can thrive in chaos, move fast without breaking everything, and tolerate the occasional 2 a.m. PagerDuty alert — is nearly impossible. We interview like crazy, make offers… and then watch as Big Tech swoops in with comp packages we can’t match.
• Tech debt? We have a mountain of it. When you’re sprinting to ship version 1, then version 2, and close your next funding round, clean code isn’t the priority. Now, every engineering all-hands starts with the same slide: “Debt cleanup: Q3 focus.” I’m not sure we’ve had a quarter without that slide.
• The psychological load is real. Half my week is spent coaching burned-out engineers, de-escalating inter-team friction, and convincing product managers that no, we can’t build five new features this sprint. Startups are emotional rollercoasters. The code is the easy part.

But — and this is why I’m still here — every once in a while, you see something magical. A prototype comes together and wows a customer. An engineer solves a problem that stumped everyone for weeks. A big client signs a multi-year deal. Those little moments remind me why I chose this life over a comfy job at Google.

Do I miss the days when I could just code? Absolutely. But building a company — watching it grow, helping people level up, seeing an idea become real — is a different kind of thrill. Messy. Stressful. But worth it.

Now, if only I could find time to refactor that old API module…

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.