I talked to so many companies who's CTOs where simply appalling. They are good coders, buy many of them have to no clue how to build, scale an lead software engineering teams. What makes things worse, they stay on the top as CTOs and raf the whole organisation down due to to fact they never transition into the role they hold. They are still coders in their heads, not leaders.

It is almost impossible to find an amazing coder and person who can scale and lead 50+ people later and be good at it. I think startups often make a mistake of hiring someone as CTO. Would it make more sense if they hire 'lead engineer' or something like that and based on company growth, this role can or don't have to evolve into leadership direction.