Your dev isn’t a CTO and that’s not their fault
Why VCs and accelerators should rethink how their startups access tech leadership
“We’ve got a great dev. They’re basically our CTO.”
If you’ve heard this from a founder in your portfolio, it’s worth pausing.
They might mean it as a compliment. But what it often means is a misunderstanding of what a CTO really does and how that gap is quietly shaping product and technical risk.
This isn’t a dig at devs. They’re amazing at what they do given the right leadership. It’s a nudge for investors and accelerator programme owners who want to set their startups up for long-term success.
Developer vs CTO. Different roles, different risks
It’s easy to conflate a strong engineer with a technical leader. After all, when resources are tight and the code needs to ship, a smart developer often becomes the go-to for everything from architecture choices to hiring plans.
But here’s the problem. Developers are trained to build. CTOs are trained to decide what to build, why, how, and when aligning with the business.
Expecting a developer to drive early-stage strategy without experience or support isn’t empowering. It’s isolating. And it introduces risks VCs should care about, such as:
- Fragile or over-engineered architectures
- Mismatched tooling and velocity
- Burnout due to unclear expectations
Asking someone to play two roles without the training, time or context for one of them is a fast track to technical debt.
Why should this matter to investors and accelerators?
The earlier a startup makes key tech decisions, the harder they are to reverse. That makes startup tech leadership a high area of influence for VCs and accelerators.
When a portfolio company delays bringing in strategic tech thinking, three things often happen:
- Founders over-rely on developers who then become bottlenecks
- Product and tech drift apart, slowing growth
- You get pulled into solving fires that could’ve been avoided
And yet, hiring a full-time CTO at seed or pre-seed is often overkill. Which leaves many startups stuck between two bad options: over-hire, or wing it.
That’s where we come in.
A smarter model: Support, not pressure
Instead of pushing early-stage companies to stretch devs beyond their remit or to spend on senior hires too soon there’s a middle ground:
Equip founders with on-demand technical insight, so they can lead confidently and make tech-based decisions quickly based on tried and tested advice from seasoned CTOs.
That’s what we built CTO in Your Pocket to do.
It’s an AI tool and platform designed to give founders:
- Real-time feedback on architecture, tooling, and hiring
- Help translating vision into structured product roadmaps
- Support during investor due diligence and tech validation
- Smarter conversations with their developers
This kind of founder support helps companies ship faster and grow without accumulating invisible risk.
Why developer overload is everyone’s problem
When devs are left to make strategic decisions without clear guidance, burnout, disengagement and reworks are common.
And what if that dev leaves? You’re left with risk and a founder who’s suddenly lost their single point of tech knowledge.
From your perspective, that’s not just inconvenient, it’s dangerous.
Fractional CTO support reduces risk by giving startups leadership-level expertise without the full-time price tag or delay.
What VCs and accelerators can do today
If you’re supporting a cohort or an early-stage portfolio, here are three quick wins:
- Encourage founders to stop expecting strategic leadership from developers
- Introduce models like CTO in your Pocket as a leadership layer
- Use fractional support as a signal. Teams that ask better questions early usually build better companies later
You don’t need to solve every technical problem for your startups. But you can give them a way to solve smarter and more sustainably.
CTO in your Pocket is now in beta
We’re now onboarding early VC portfolios and accelerator programmes into our FREE beta access program.
If you want to offer scalable, cost-effective tech clarity across your portfolio and help founders lead well without overhiring. Let’s talk.