Bad CTOs mean startups have millions of dollars’ worth of cap table dead weight

> In many cases, however, that’s not what happens, and the CTO was basically the smartest person with a CS degree standing close to the CEO when the company was formed. The end result is that a lot of startups wind up giving a huge chunk of equity to someone who is essentially doing a job a semi-decent engineer could have done.

I think fundamentally (early stage) CEOs are judged the same way as well right? First time founders, especially the CEO, having to figure out sales and GTM etc. - very rarely do they get it right the first time. I certainly didn't. That's the risk of running a startup and investing in a startup. As the company scales, both CEO and CTO have to grow into their "new" roles every 6-18 months anyway. So, it's weird to single out the CTO, or really any founding member at all for "cap table dead weight".

Standing around making money on the deal while being basically useless? Who do these CTOs they think they are, VCs?

Original paywalled source with less spicy title: https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/17/evaluating-cto-venture-cap... This sounds like it refers to what we would probably call non-tech startups and is less likely to apply to tech startups.