10 Best Articles on CTO
The most useful articles on CTO from around the web—beginners to advanced—curated by thought leaders and our community. We focus on timeless pieces and update the list whenever we discover new, must-read articles or videos—make sure to bookmark and revisit this page.
Top 5 CTO Articles
At a glance: these are the articles that have been most read, shared, and saved on CTO by Refind users in 2023 so far.
Short Articles
Short on time? Check out these useful short articles on CTO—all under 10 minutes.
Your CTO Should Actually Be Technical
Why engineering leaders also need to be great engineers.
Operations vs. Algorithms: Advice for scaling startups from Ian Wong, CTO of Opendoor
Ian Wong is the co-founder and CTO of Opendoor. He discusses the tricky balance between operations and data science in the early days of the startup, and his advice for other founders looking to make…
Steve Blank Finding and Growing the Islands of Innovation inside a large company
This post previously appeared in Fast Company. How does a newly hired Chief Technology Officer (CTO) find and grow the islands of innovation inside a large company? How not to waste your first six …
Buy or build? Make a change or stay the course? Zendesk CTO Adrian McDermott on scaling startups
Adrian McDermott joined Zendesk in 2010, when the company had 50 employees. Now as CTO, he’s seen the team grow to over 5000. He shares his lessons on scaling, answering common startup dilemmas and…
Long Articles
These are some of the most-read long-form articles on CTO.
The Company-Building Cornerstones Every Founder Needs to Focus On — Advice from HubSpot
Dharmesh Shah has spent the last 15 years as co-founder & CTO of HubSpot. He pinpoints the inflection points and key decisions that other founders face in the early days, from choosing a co-founder to…
«Passion for learning: “To this day, we will send each other emails at 1 or 2 AM with a new book recommendation (and we’re both night owls — I’m not sure if the relationship would have thrived otherwise). We know what’s on each other’s reading list, we discuss talks we watched. This extended to our early employees, who were similarly academically-oriented,” says Shah.»
I’m Sorry, But Those Are Vanity Metrics
After three decades of leading data teams at companies like LiveOps, Netscape and ReadyForce, Looker founder and CTO Lloyd Tabb's biggest learning isn’t what you would expect — or want to hear: You’re measuring the wrong metrics. We all are.
The Best Advice We Overheard at First Round's CTO Unconference
Our second annual CTO Unconference brought together 160+ of the sharpest technical leaders we know. Here's a rundown of some of the best tactics we heard them share.
#define CTO
I joined Stripe as an engineer in 2010. I began by working on the backend infrastructure: designing the server architecture, creating our credit card vault, and producing internal abstractions to make people’s jobs easier. I loved writing code,... | Greg Brockman | Svbtle
Lessons Learned: What does a startup CTO actually do?
What does your Chief Technology Officer do all day? Often times, it seems like people are thinking it's synonymous with "that guy who gets p...
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