When Should a Startup Hire a CTO? (And When You Shouldn't)
When Should a Startup Hire a CTO? (And When You Shouldn't)
We've been doing this for 25 years. Not the polished startup-speak version. The real version—the all-nighters, the abandoned architectures, the teams that clicked and the ones that didn't. If there's one question we hear from founders, it's this: *Do I need a CTO?*
The answer isn't what most people expect.
Everyone's read the playbook: you need a brilliant technologist to lead your product vision, validate your MVP, and architect for scale. And yes—that's true. But here's what nobody tells you: hiring a full-time CTO too early can be one of the biggest mistakes you make.
We've seen it kill startups. And we've seen when to hire a cto startup: actually makes the difference between success and another failed pivot.
The Case Against Hiring a CTO (Too Soon)
Let's start with the brutal truth: a full-time CTO is expensive. Not just salary—though that's painful enough—but equity. If you're offering real responsibility and a real slice of your company, you're looking at 5-10%, sometimes more.
That's a permanent dilution of your cap table for someone you're about to discover may not be the right fit.
Here's what actually happens in early-stage startups:
You don't know what you're building yet.: Your product changes. Your market changes. Your fundamental assumptions about what customers want? Gone by week six. Hiring a CTO before you've validated your core hypothesis is like hiring an architect before you've decided whether you're building a house, a shopping centre, or a boat.
The tech stack doesn't matter yet.: We've built global platforms in PHP, Python, Node.js, Go, Ruby. We've done React, Vue, Angular, mobile, cloud. The language is a detail. The problem you're solving isn't. A great CTO spent at a 2001-era startup obsessing over database architecture when the real issue was that nobody wanted the product.
You can't actually afford them.: Let's be realistic. A proper CTO in London is £80-120k salary, plus benefits, plus the standard 7-10% equity you'd offer. That's north of £100k a year in cash alone. If you've just landed a seed round and have 18 months of runway, that CTO is eating 7-8% of your burn rate. For comparison, another engineer could cost less and you'd keep more equity in reserve.
The culture fit risk is enormous.: That CTO hire is your longest relationship in a startup. Longer than some founding team combinations last. Getting it wrong isn't just expensive—it's a company-killer. One technical leader with the wrong vision, or who burns out, or who doesn't trust your non-technical co-founders? That's a slow death.
According to CB Insights, wrong team composition is the second leading cause of startup failure—cited in 23% of post-mortems. And we'd bet that a significant chunk of those are CTO hiring mistakes.
Signs You Actually DO Need a CTO (Right Now)
Okay, so when should you hire one? When the answer to most of these is *yes*:
Your product is fundamentally, unavoidably technical.: Not "we need software"—everyone does. We mean: the core differentiator is the architecture. You're building low-latency trading systems, real-time data pipelines, complex ML models, or infrastructure that genuinely needs to handle scale on day one. If your tech is the moat, you need a CTO.
You've already validated product-market fit.: You have customers. Real ones. Paying ones. The question isn't "will people use this?"—it's "how do we scale this without it falling apart?" Now a CTO adds value immediately because they're solving a concrete problem, not betting on an unknown.
Your founding team is non-technical.: If you're a pure business/marketing founder, and you don't have a co-founder who can code, bringing in a technical leader makes sense. Not as a subordinate—as a co-founder equivalent or equity partner. This is different from hiring a CTO as an employee.
You've already grown past your first engineer.: When you have 2-3 engineers, the overhead of coordination starts to spike. A technical leader who can mentor, architect, and make trade-off decisions becomes useful. But this isn't usually a CTO hire—it's a technical lead, often the first engineer promoted.
You're fundraising for Series A and beyond.: Investors want a credible technical leader. They want to see someone who's built things before, who investors have heard of. A CTO becomes a board-level necessity at this scale.
The Real Answer: The Fractional CTO Alternative
Here's what we've learned from 25+ partnerships over the past couple of decades: most early-stage startups don't need a full-time CTO. They need a fractional one.:
It sounds like a compromise. It isn't. It's often the *better* choice.
A fractional CTO—whether that's a fractional CTO service, a technical advisor, or someone like us working as an equity co-founder on a reduced retainer—gives you:
Real seniority without the full salary hit.: You get someone with 15+ years of shipping products, who knows what actually works, without paying full London rates. We typically work at 50-70% of a full-time CTO salary, sometimes less if there's equity involved.
Optionality.: If the fit isn't right, you pivot. If your product direction changes, your technical advisor changes with it. You're not locked in for four years of cap table dilution. When you're in the "figure out what we're building" phase, this flexibility is worth thousands.
Flexibility on time.: A fractional CTO isn't in your office full-time, and that's *exactly* what you need. You need someone for 10-15 hours a week to sanity-check architecture decisions, mentor your engineers, and kill bad ideas before they waste three months. You don't need someone grinding away on day-to-day coding.
Someone who's done it.: The risk with hiring a junior CTO, or an engineer promoted to the role, is that they've never actually made these decisions at scale. A fractional CTO is usually someone who's built multiple products, navigated exits, understood burn, and actually knows what matters.
How much does a fractional CTO cost? Less than you'd think. Depending on the arrangement—pure retainer, equity stake, hybrid—you're typically looking at £8-20k per month for someone senior. Compare that to £6-10k per month for a full-time CTO, plus equity, plus benefits.
The Decision Framework
So how do you actually decide? Use this mental model:
Stage 1: Pre-product.: Do you have customers yet? No. Do you know what you're building? Sort of. Do you need a CTO? No. You need a great first engineer and a fractional technical advisor. Even better if one of your founders can code. Hire a fractional CTO for 6-10 hours a week. Cost them a couple of grand a month. Move fast.
Stage 2: Post-launch, pre-PMF.: You have users, but you're still iterating wildly on what works. Still no CTO. Hire two senior engineers and keep the fractional CTO. You're optimizing for iteration speed, not scale. One of those engineers might grow into a technical lead.
Stage 3: PMF, pre-scale.: You've found something that works. Growth is predictable. Users are paying. Now you need a technical leader focused on infrastructure, reliability, and hiring. This is when a fractional CTO evolves into an equity partner—someone who's thinking about the next three years, not the next three months.
Stage 4: Series A and beyond.: You need a full-time CTO now. You're building a real team, setting technical direction, managing engineers, and talking to investors. This is no longer optional. Hire the best person you can afford and give them real co-founder equity and title.
The Mistake Nobody Talks About
We've watched dozens of startups do this: they hire a CTO in Stage 1. Brilliant person. Right title. Wrong time.
What happens?
The first six months are fine. But then the product pivots. The CTO—suddenly with skin in the game and a clear vision—resists. There's tension. The founder wants to change direction; the CTO has already architected for a different one.
Or worse: the CTO over-engineers everything. They start optimizing for scale when the real problem is getting to 100 users. They build for flexibility that never gets used. Three engineers and a CTO, and you're still at the ramen noodle stage, but your technical debt is already crushing you.
We've been that CTO. We've made those mistakes. And we've learned: the best time to hire a CTO is almost never the time you think you need one.:
When We Work With Startups
That's why we take on 3-4 new ventures a year, and we're usually in fractional or equity-partner roles, not full-time jobs. We've spent 25 years building platforms handling billions of messages and millions of concurrent users. We've done exits. We know what works and what doesn't.
But mostly, we've learned that the answer to "when should I hire a CTO?" is usually "not yet—let me help you figure out what you're actually building first."
The Real Answer
Here it is, stripped of the diplomacy:
If you're asking whether you need a full-time CTO right now, the answer is probably no. You need a great engineer, a fractional technical advisor, and founders who understand their own product deeply enough to make hard trade-offs.
Hire a full-time CTO when:
- You've proven product-market fit
- You're about to scale past 5-10 engineers
- Your technical challenges require someone thinking three years ahead
- You're raising Series A from investors who expect board-level technical representation
Until then? Get a fractional CTO. Find an exceptional engineer as your first hire. And obsess over whether anyone actually wants what you're building.
Everything else is noise.
About Cooply
We're a technical founding team, based between South Wales and Yorkshire, with 25+ years of experience shipping products that matter. We've worked together since 2000, done 25+ exits, and deliberately stopped being a traditional agency to work as equity partners with founders who are solving genuinely hard problems.
We work as fractional CTOs, equity co-founders, or a hybrid of both—whatever the stage and structure requires. We're tech-agnostic, team-first, and we tell founders what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.