This depends on how many other founders there are, and whether there is any other staff as well.

Im a CTO and Cofounder, im probably more of a COO though, responsible also for the CTO responsibilities.

I’m involved in absolutely everything and its extremely difficult balancing it all.

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A key take away from my current startup is ensuring your founding team has the right people to fill the most important leadership positions and the experience to build teams around them.

To add to what other people are saying, in the early years you are more of a cofounder than a CTO. You have to do what it takes, whether or not it is part of the job description of a CTO. Once you get bigger you’ll fall more and more into the traditional CTO role as new hires will take over some of your non-traditional responsibilities.

In other words, the titles don’t matter much at the beginning.

CTO/Co-founder here, hi!

Short answer is “yes, all of the above, for as long as it takes”

I think the longer answer is that it depends on the founding team. In my case, my partner and I have neen working together for many years and we’ve learned how to divvy up the work.

In general I think as a co-founder you will be expected to talk to investors, partners and customers/prospects. The level at which you’re expected to lead these conversations goes back to the composition of the founding team.

Part of of growing the company is identifying the organizational gaps, and making plans for filling them. Not only is that important for your sanity (you can’t do everything forever), but investors want to know how you’ll be spending their money.

The cool thing about being a founder is getting to hire for the work you don’t love doing, but, it takes time to get there.

My responsibilities are pretty much all things tech, but I also manage customer support, take sales calls, shepherd pilots, VC pitches, financial planning, hiring decisions across the entire org, legal, pretty much everything still, though with things outside of tech my CEO has final executive call, but Im still there as a second brain.

As a litigator who is currently litigating a case on behalf on behalf of a CTO cofounder who was screwed over by the CEO cofounder with an MBA: make sure you are getting separate advice on your rights and not just relying on the CEO/company counsel to understand your rights. “Business divorce” destroys promising startups; get separate representation at critical points early on and it will save a lot of expense and risk to the business later on.

This isn’t to say you should distrust your cofounder, but understanding exactly where you stand prevents fallings-out down the line.

Fractional CTO here. I’m involved in basically everything. I write pitches, roadmaps, attend meetings, contribute to the business plan, and so on. I have experience from many startups and know the “game” pretty well, so I usually have something meaningful to contribute with in most areas.

If you are purely technical, you can identify your weak spots and try to either delegate tasks or upskill in those areas.

However, your CEO should be taking care of talking to clients and pitching to VCs. That’s their job. Of course you can play a part in that, but your focus should be on recruiting, managing developers, building the product, creating a good culture, etc.

CTO in hardware startup: when I’m not doing tech. It’s road map, strategy, and talking to investors. I do a little bit of operations mostly just setting up systems that are needed. I also do a lot of the hiring/receuiting.
I used to be a ceo so I can do any of those tasks, but prefer to only do it when asked/ needed.

As you go up the food chain, you’re job is to do less of the “work” and more time creating and debugging systems that do the work. Some new CTO’s find it hard to realize that means you probably won’t write a lot of code or do a lot of technical work. You’re job is to understand that and interpret it for the executives, and to keep the technical team on track.

If you’re having trouble with work load the first question to ask is what work is truly important and time sensitive, then what can only you do and what should be delegated or handed off. You’re probably doing a lot of non cto work.

Second time working on a company with my co-founder.

I’ll give a different perspective than many others here: I focus on all things tech, my co-founder focuses on all things sales/logistics. We work together on future of company and financials.

If tech isn’t super busy and my co-founder needs me to do something, I’ll absolutely do it. But typically I’m helping him do his job through tech (building internal tools, writing scrapers to make finding new clients easier, etc). We didn’t need to raise at our last company, and we might not raise this time either, but I would absolutely be at meetings with VCs/angels.

It depends on the needs for your company. If tech is critical, or every hour you spend on tech is more valuable than an hour spent on logistics, then you’ll probably focus on that. I think it will make sense while you’re doing it though. If your co-founder(s) is/are overwhelmed and tech can hang on for a minute, then you know what you need to do!