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?