Code of Leadership S2E20: Where Does a CTO Have More Freedom—a Startup or a Corporation? With Kirill Evseenko (#Leadership)
In a startup, a CTO can make a decision in the morning and see it in the product by evening—but people, money, and time are almost always scarce. A corporation has far more resources, but every serious change must pass through many dependencies. So where is there more freedom in the end? And what matters more: the freedom to make decisions or the ability to change a large system in practice?
On September 11 at 18:00 Moscow time, there will be a new Code of Leadership livestream with Kirill Evseenko, CTO of the Zvuk music service.
Kirill began by refilling printer cartridges and working in systems administration, then worked on travel services and a medical startup, led technology and product at START, and is now CTO of Zvuk. We will therefore compare startups and corporations not through the usual memes about speed and bureaucracy, but through real decisions, constraints, and the cost of mistakes. Kirill also has his own channel, @tak_ya_vse_pridumal.
We will discuss:
• which startup habits help at scale and which turn the CTO into the bottleneck; • where approvals genuinely protect against an expensive mistake and where they merely dilute responsibility; • which decisions a CTO should retain and which they should categorically not make; • how to move from personal control to a system of strong leaders without losing touch with engineering reality; • what happens to a leader's speed, responsibility, and influence when a team grows from dozens to hundreds of people.
We will also test the formula “fast startup, slow corporation.” Perhaps speed does not disappear as scale grows. Earlier, you accelerated the company by acting quickly yourself; now, you do it by creating a system in which hundreds of people can make good decisions quickly without you.
And we will try to answer the central question: at what point does a technical leader stop being the chief engineer and become the CTO?
Bring your questions for Kirill and your own stories of moving between startups and large companies to the comments.
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