Nobody sets out to become an accidental CTO. You become one the way you become the person who knows how the office printer works: by being present at the wrong moment and slightly less confused than everybody else.
For me it was a DNS record. A domain had expired, the site was down, and I was the only person in a room of fourteen who could explain what a nameserver did. That explanation cost me the next three years of my life, and I'd do it again.
The title arrives before the skills do. The job is closing that gap before anyone gets hurt.
What surprised me was how little of the job was technical. The hard parts were telling a founder that his timeline was fiction, and telling an engineer that his elegant abstraction was the reason onboarding took three weeks.
Knowing what DNS is remains the single highest-leverage career move I ever made.
The title arrives before the skills do. That's true for everyone in this role, including the ones with impressive LinkedIn headlines. The work is learning fast enough that nobody notices the gap.
