Mentors who have been CTOs and startup engineering leaders
Work with CTOs and startup engineering leaders on early technical decisions, hiring your first engineers, and the parts of the job that are about the business rather than the code.
Before you book a CTO mentor
How do I choose the right CTO mentor?
Most early CTO mistakes are not technical. They are hiring too fast, hiring people like yourself, building infrastructure for a scale that never arrives, or failing to say no to a founder who wants everything. Someone who has already made a few of these will save you the expensive ones.
What should I bring to a CTO mentor session?
If you are a technical founder, the hardest transition is that your value stops being what you build. Ask directly how they handled the point where writing code became the wrong use of their time — and how they knew.
For a first engineering hire, ask about the actual trade: a generalist who ships versus a specialist who is stronger in one area. It is one of the highest-consequence decisions in an early company and it is almost always made on instinct.
What people bring to these sessions
- Technical decisions that are hard to reverse later
- Hiring your first engineers and building a team
- Knowing when to stop writing code yourself
- Talking about engineering to a board or investors
- Deciding what not to build
4 mentors
- Juan Cruz Viotti — Founder | Fractional CTO | O'Reilly author | JSON Schema TSC | Award-winning University of Oxford alumnus at sourcemeta. API Governance, Technical Writing, Engineering Management
- Philip Meyers — Founder at reflowai. AI/LLM integration, iOS and Android app store deployment, SaaS architecture
- Rajiv Mishra — Head of Strategy Execution & Operations | Chief of Staff to VP Engineering at coupang. Chief of Staff, Leadership, Executive Partnership & Advisory
- Priyanka Gyawali — Chief Technology Officer at upplft. Technical Leadership, Enterprise Architecture, Artificial Intelligence (AI)