Hi Arturo,

yes, but we need to keep in mind that a C-Level position at a startup is fundamentally different to the same titled position at a big company (let's stick to extremes, to make it clear. Btw., did you adjust the title?).

Let's assume your startup is you and your 4 friends. One of them becomes CTO. What are his/her tasks? I assume it evolves around building some infrastructure, hire a few developers, code a lot of the time, make contacts to several SaaS providers. That kind of stuff and he/she will be autonomous most of the time with only a few people that you have to take care of.

Now, can you apply this to a CTO at... let's say Microsoft? I highly doubt it. There's way more responsibily you need to take, there's way more staff you need to manage, way more processes with different takes from different perspectives and different cultures (b/c you'll be responsible for the international markets, too). It will be likely that you don't code any more and are doing tons of strategic stuff that thousands of people rely on.

Just read those "What I wish I knew earlier when I transitioned into a managagement position"-like articles here on Medium. The common theme in those articles is that people that come from a tech background often struggle to get comfortable to do actual managing and they miss the old tasks they had.

So, given the above, do you think any of the FAANG-companies which are no startups any more, would nominate someone with those traits (which mostly stems from missing experience) as CTO?

Besides, I don't think any FAANG company nominated an inexperienced employee to CTO even in the early days. Most of them were pretty experienced in what they did.