As the technical half of my company, it is all too often incorrectly assumed that I am the CTO.
According to Eric Ries, the CTO's primary job is to ensure the company's business goals are met by the technology strategy. This involves choosing the right platform(s) to build on top of, fully understanding all tradeoffs involved, and ultimately deciding where to focus R&D efforts based on what's best for the company. Spoondate's current full JavaScript stack has been validated by past projects created by me over the last two years as well as by a number of proven, scalable projects from NodeKnockout. The entire system has been designed from the beginning to eventually require no human intervention to operate* - minimal R&D is required if at all. The CTO job for Spoondate is essentially reduced to evangelism - a task where someone more outgoing would be more apt.
The COO's primary role is to collect, dissect, and condense data from the company for the CEO - who ultimately makes decisions from said data. Trust is a huge factor in this relationship - a malicious COO can distort the data, undermine the CEO, and try to replace the CEO. Raissa, Spoondate's CEO, and I have established a relationship of history of trust and aligned goals. Furthermore, I have a proven track record of providing Raissa with extremely valuable, unbiased data about pretty much everything. I'm never going threaten her position as CEO (unlike an incoming executive hire).
My background is further advantageous to this position. As an engineer, my technical skills are invaluable in a business world - I can build my own tools to automate or accelerate almost any aspect of my job. Personality-wise, I am happiest in roles that don't require lavish attention - when my job is executed correctly, no one should notice a thing. This complements the position well. On the flip side, mistakes inevitably happen and I can resolve them and prevent regressions without overhead or oversight.
As COO, by design, I have a significantly better capital efficiency - I accomplish more for the same budget. I have the ideal (and hard to find) COO-to-CEO relationship.
- Van, COO, Spoondate.com
* Our codebase supports i18n, feature flags, split testing, continuous deployment, real-time monitoring & analytics, zero-downtime deployments, page speed best practices, (eventually automatic) progressive enhancement, web app security best practices, dynamic asset packaging, and many other production-ready (read unit-tested) features. In the future, we might only need 1 full-time engineer to add new features (or maybe 0!**).
** It is possible! Just means that a non-technical person would be able to add features without code.
***For me, often, zero feedback is a pat-on-the-back. That means no fires to put out.