Many entrepreneurs are change makers. They see this they want to change and politics is one of the ways to do it.

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.

Yeah you’re already in mecca for startups. You could hang around the incubators or get an associate job there, there’s tons like the silicon valley robotics hub, and other social groups that are founder heavy.

We just raised several million on safes from reputable investors. They aren’t going anywhere.

I agree many founders including myself worked past burnout.

Your decision quality goes down, health goes down and then when you really need to pull a rabbit out of the hat you can’t cause you haven’t taken a day off in half a year.

I think the bigger point here is don’t confuse being busy with working hard and as a founder be hyper vigilant on what you need to do and what others can do.

Diagnose. Not every product has to be a use it for life type product as long as the lifetime customer value is positive and healthy.

You can try churn prevention strategies. You can do a referral system or credits for free time or other incentives. Push heavily for yearly premium subscribition and gate features behind that.

Or you can look at wider feature set that keeps people on. Sounds like you solve a one a year or once a career problem.