applgo443

Hi,

A friend of mine and I are thinking of starting a company together. My friend is a sales/marketing person (CEO), and I'm the (only) technical person (CTO).

I want to know what it really takes to be a CTO. On one end, I see people starting companies directly after their college as a CTO. On the other end, I see people who were architects at FAANG, built massive open-source projects before starting their companies as CTO. I'm somewhere in between - I have a few years of experience at FAANG as a Senior ML Engineer, but most of my work has been on platform/ML research rather than things like full stack development, deployment, etc.

I am trying to figure out if I'm capable enough to be a CTO. I understand there will be a lot of on-the-job learning, but my question is more about how much I should already know on day one.

The question is deliberately a little vague as it's tough to convey my full background. I would appreciate any tips or suggestions here.

What's the best way for engineers to know about generic workplace interpersonal conflicts and how to resolve them? Things like dealing with colleague who steals your work, micromanging boss, etc. A lot of people face same issues and feels like we should have a handbook of sorts.

Why aren't there good tools to measure your feet size when you buy shoes online? It should be a relatively simple Computer Vision problem.

On a relate note, Nike launched this and called it AR Fit in 2019. They shut it down. Any idea what happened to it?

Why isn't there a crypto debit card? Pay with your crypto at a restaurant instead of cash.

And why isn't there 'Pay with crypto' option for online purchases just like pay with visa/master? Simply open your metamask, select a token and instantly pay.

What am I missing here?

For people citing GAS, sure. Use SOL/Matic. GAS isn't an issue here.

Would you pay for a fully encrypted google photos alternative?

1. You could unlock it with your regular web2 way (Gmail, email-password, etc) or use your crypto wallet (==> complete privacy).

2. Photos would be encrypted and then distributed over IPFS --> No one except you can ever recover them

3. There'd be on-device ML features so that you could still get the useful features - search by person's face, search for a picture of church, etc.

What would tip you to leave Google Photos in favor of such a product?

Is there a bloomberg terminal for NFTs? How would you analyze price changes and other analytics? How would you analyze twitter sentiments and discord trading volumes? Seems like a solution is helpful here.