Tips for Translating Engineering to Executives

A lot has been said about how lonely it gets being a founder/CEO of a startup company; you can probably pick any Ben Horowitz quotes here about the struggle or the cold sweat in the middle of the night and you’d be right.

But there is one position that can be even more cruel than being CEO. Being VP of Engineering is harder and lonelier. In fact, your VP of Dev is probably the loneliest person in your company.

_I remember exactly where it hit me and probably where the seeds of starting LinearB were planted in my head. _

It was one of those Monday mornings after a tough week before. I was just appointed to the VP of R&D of a great security startup and was walking into a Monday morning CEO staff meeting. One of the latest deployments exploded (and not in a nice way) because of a human error and I was fighting side by side with the team throughout the weekend to restore the situation to the normal state.

When I think back to it, I can still feel the wrath of the CEO in that meeting. I did not get a single day of grace in my new role and, if that wasn’t enough, I had to deal with 3 frustrated developers that told me how stuff is broken because all the execs care about is delivering new features and how they will never understand what technical debt is and how if you slow down and build things right you will eventually move faster.

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