You want a CTO who has experience delivering projects and building products from the ground up. Wisdom comes in many forms, but at the base of it is experience. They’re pragmatic and grounded in their approach, which, while decidedly less sexy, is ultimately better for building a company.

They will be better suited to seeing how business needs translate into technical solutions. They’re a coding phenom who has been hyped up by the press to seem like “the next big thing.” They may be great for the image of your brand as one that’s ready to take a leap, but ultimately they still have a lot to learn about navigating the world.Ī “wizard”, on the other hand, is a seasoned technologist who has built many things, and has been successful at most of them (because what is success if you didn’t trip on your wizard robe along the way at least a couple of times?). In more practical terms, at least for the purposes of this conversation, a “rock star” CTO is going to be someone who has had recent success building something big. When it comes time to hire your next CTO, ignore all of these and find yourself a wizard.īefore we get into what rock stars and wizards look like in the tech world, let’s look at what they are in the real world. There are a lot of terms in tech that describe the kind of talent a team is looking for: unicorn, 10x, and, my personal least favorite, rock star.

Wizard with a gun platforms