I did 5 years as CEO after 7 as CTO. CEO was managing sales, marketing and operations. It was fun while I was learning things, but ended up realizing that I was not happier than before:
1. I was/am just an average manager compared to an awesome CTO. I felt limited by mind own engineer training. Plently of people are/were better than me in managing other people/taking care of operations.
2. I didn't really enjoy it as much as I enjoy building products and tech stacks. After the learning rush goes, sadness prevails.
So, if you are going to go in that journey, just remember that your career must become that something. You are now a business person and not a technical person anymore. Your career is then to build as many profitable companies as you can, regardless of how cool the technical products are. Your source of professional happiness must be to build amazing companies, not just products anymore.
Replies (4)
whats the point of making a technical toy that noone uses. I don’t think you can separate marketing/business if you care about building things people will use. (People as in millions+)
Absolutely understand what you mean. I am on the business side of a product team, definitely not that high in the food chain, lol. But still on the business side. Managing stakeholders’ expectations, dealing with this whole growth BS and slowly getting tired of this and approaching more and more the technical side. I’m seriously considering this shift and I think it would make me more happy than dealing the whole time with people whose interest is solely driving profit.
You are right, there is no point. But you don't need to separate them. I never did. My main learning was to understand which part of that problem I want to truly invest my daily hours on.
It's like they what they say... The secret to happiness is to enjoy the journey, not to get to the destination. Excelling in the day-to-day activities of different positions will take a tow unless you actually like doing those things.
Good thing is that you can always come back if you end up not liking it.
You have the experience, just go for a start up. Find a tech partner that has a half baked solution you think you can 10x the marketing/sales to be your founder. There are a LOT of them out there.
As a founder, you can just cut all that crap and make your own rules, hopefully building a team that is also happier with those rules.
