Synopsis
You're only a first-time CTO/CPO once, but that first time can be a daunting challenge for startup leaders. Without a blueprint or a guide, you're in a tough spot to manage all the details of technology/product, develop the right culture, organize and motivate teams, hire and career path people, plus get a product out into the market. Startup CTO was written to help the first-time CTO/CPO navigate product development challenges and provide tactics and best practices for how you can grow a high-performing function.
Matt Blumberg and Shawn Nussbaum have decades of technology, product, and leadership experience from founding a company, scaling it, and exiting. They cover a wide range of topics from technical strategy, to proportional engineering, managing technical debt, due diligence in a sale process, creating a high-performance development culture, and more. The authors share how to collaborate effectively in the executive suite and with functional leaders throughout an organization. As an added bonus, Matt shares CEO-to-CEO advice on what a great CTO/CPO looks like, signs your CTO/CPO isn't scaling, and how to engage with the CTO/CPO.
Startup CTO will help you pinpoint gaps or weaknesses, turn those into strengths, and help you scale yourself, the technology/product function, and your organization.
About the Authors
Matt Blumberg has spent his entire career creating startups, scaling them, and sharing best practices of what works and what doesn't work for other CEOs and team members in the entrepreneurial community. He is the author of "Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business" (Wiley, 2020), an influential book embraced by entrepreneurs, CEOs, founders, and board of directors in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Startup CEO was an outgrowth of his blog, StartupCEO.com. In 1999, he founded Return Path, an innovative email marketing company, helped it to $100m in revenues, and led it to a successful exit in a strategic sale to Validity in 2019. Along with colleagues from Return Path, Matt started Bolster in 2020, a company focused on helping startups and scaleups grow, develop, and scale their leadership teams and boards. Matt's second book, "Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company's Critical Functions and Teams" (Wiley, 2021), was a collaboration with Bolster's CXOs to provide a blueprint for scaling up each function. Before Return Path, Matt led Marketing, Product Management, and the Internet Group for MovieFone, Inc. (later acquired by AOL). Prior to that, he served as an associate with private equity firm General Atlantic Partners and was a consultant with Mercer Management Consulting. He also cofounded and chairs the board of Path Forward, a nonprofit created and spun out of Return Path. Path Forward's mission is to empower people to restart their careers after time spent focused on caregiving by working with companies offering mid-career internships. Path Forward gives women and men a path to a professional career, while giving companies access to a diverse, untapped talent force. Matt is currently Executive Chair at Bolster. He earned his A.B. from Princeton University.
Shawn Nussbaum is a technical leader and consummate problem solver with over 30 years of experience developing software and leading high-performing teams. Shawn worked at Return Path from 2010 to 2019, where he led Product and Engineering and was responsible for setting the vision and culture of the organization, extracting meaning from email data, and applying technology as a force-multiplier to solve interesting and difficult problems for customers. Prior to Return Path, he helped launch two Internet companies and was an advisor and technical director for a consortium of insurance companies. Shawn cofounded Bolster in 2020, a company focused on helping startups and scaleups grow, develop, and scale their leadership teams and boards. Shawn contributed to "Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company's Critical Functions and Teams" (Wiley, 2021), sharing his experience, tips, and best practices for CTO/CPOs for creating effective product development leaders and culture as they scale up the technology/product function. He believes that empathy and usefulness are the keys to remarkable products.
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