I was curious what an ex teammate had been up to, which led me to this Medium post from him: CTO Logs: Casai. Impressive and a little intimidating, and this just covers part of what he’s been up to. It covers his journey from joining the company as CTO, building up its engineering workforce, to his exit.
He points to this LinkedIn post from the CEO of the company sharing some of what he learned on running a business from their experiences. My attempt at distilling his five lessons:
- Have solid, standardized bookkeeping from the start to avoid a mess later.
- Have clear guidelines on promotions, bonuses, etc., backed by an adequately staffed people ops department. (This makes me think of companies like Gitlab or PostHog that publish their handbooks online. Is that the sort of clarity he’s talking about? “Investing more in people” also makes me think of the wonderful book Debugging Teams.)
- Be conservative in taking on new expenses, especially in hiring.
- Even (or especially?) as CEO, be open with others in sharing problems, in accepting their advice.
I admire others who’ve taken the leap into starting their own business. Hoping to keep on learning from them though I’m not sure when if ever I’ll try following that path myself.
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