Naval Ravikant, the founder of angel list, and a prolific investor, has a famous expression that goes something like “ if you can build and sell, you will become invincible.”
And you may question which is the easier one to start with here. In Naval‘s opinion: learning to build is the harder part and it’s better to start with that, then learn to sell.
But it actually isn’t easy at all for builders (e.g., software engineers) to be good at selling and leading — and it’s not because of knowledge.
Builders don’t lack the ability to learn sales and leadership (quite the opposite. They’re often very good learners).
It tends to be because builders are good builders because they go deep into topics. Builders are curious and wander, they pick at underwater rocks they come across and continue doing so with the hope for gold (and if not knowledge).
Where as for sales and leadership, for the most part the higher level picture is much more important than the lower level one.
Volume, communication and alignment can be much more important than depth
Time always has a trade-off. Getting stuck in details and wandering too much means you delegate and empower others too little, you don’t communicate enough, and you aren’t ensuring companywide alignment.
Most CTOs, technical managers and technical cofounders will hit this critical point at some point in their career.
As a technical leader, at some point you recognize that your words have more power than your code.
The hardest part of this decision is feeling comfortable working at increasingly higher levels without understanding the lower level.
A CTO, like a diver on a plank, has to often oscillate from seeing things from the top to diving deep to better understand what’s going on to inform their judgment.
That said, you can’t free dive at all times and will need to substitute deep understanding with a trust for teammates who require the deeper lower level understanding.
