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Half a CEO's time is hiring
Time spent hiring
Over a lunch decades ago, Jeff Bezos put half his time on bums on seats. A week ago, over coffee, a founder at Suno put his own recruiting time at 30 to 40%.
Where founder roles split
The two founding roles split at some point. Up to about 50 people, the CTO is golden. After that, a company may bring in stronger technical skills, and a good cofounding CTO turns into a Swiss Army knife who gets deployed in different ways.
The CEO learning curve
The CEO goes on a steep learning curve: managing people and filling seats. There are plenty of founders and far fewer entrepreneurs, and the difference shows up in fortitude, energy, and the ability to climb that curve. TJ at PillPack and Jack at SeatGeek came out of it as changed individuals.
Why does a CTO's role shift at 50 people?
Around that size a company can no longer run on direct conversation among everyone, so managers and specialist teams appear. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar estimated that people can maintain about 150 stable relationships, and organizations often feel strain well before that number. As engineering teams grow, someone has to spend time on hiring, planning, and coordination instead of writing code. Many companies add a head of engineering at this stage who has run large teams before.
How does Amazon keep its hiring bar high?
Amazon uses a process called the Bar Raiser, in which a trained interviewer from outside the hiring team joins the interview loop. That person can veto a hire, even when the hiring manager wants to go ahead. The role exists to keep managers under deadline pressure from lowering standards. Bar Raisers are drawn from employees who completed internal training for the role.
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