I specialize in recruiting leadership roles for startups. As a result, I end up talking to lots of Founders in businesses at different stages of maturity and, quite often, common themes will become evident. For example, in the past few days, I met with three really early stage, non-technical Founders, all of whom had been developing their products with external agencies and were now thinking about hiring their own CTO. For all three, funds were tight and yet they still wanted to (and absolutely deserved to) hire a great CTO. Given that similar questions and issues were raised, I thought it might be useful to share some of these here in case you are trying to find a CTO for your own early stage startup.
The discussions typically followed this format:
We are an early stage startup and we don’t have much money. How can we attract a good CTO to join our startup? Could we pay our CTO a really low base salary and have them earn equity?
There are a few problems with paying a “really low” base salary to an experienced tech leader. Firstly…to read more of this article click here.
This article was written by Luke Henningsen and he is Co-Founder of the growing startup community at Ucities which is being developed to help provide a dedicated space for founders and startup people to network and support each other. He also leads a business called Scale & Swing, which delivers executive search to startups looking for senior talent at a startup-friendly price-point. Feel free to reach out to Luke on LinkedIn or at Scale & Swing or join the growing community at Ucities.