When You Actually Need a CTO — and When You're Just Buying a Title

I get this question from Nigerian founders about twice a month.

“Gift, we’re raising. Investors are asking about our tech leadership. We need a CTO. Can you introduce me to some senior engineers who’d be interested in a CTO role?”

I understand the question. I’ve asked it myself. But eight years of running a software firm in Lagos — and watching what happens when founders act on it too early — has made me answer it differently every time.

Half of the Nigerian founders asking me for a CTO don’t need one. Some need a senior engineer. Some need a fractional CTO. A few genuinely need a full-time CTO — but not the ones who usually think they do.

This piece is the version of the answer I’ve stopped shortening on calls, because when I shorten it I watch founders make expensive mistakes.

What a CTO actually is

The word “CTO” gets used to mean four different jobs in Nigerian startup conversations:

1. The most senior engineer, who writes the hard code and mentors the juniors.
2. The technology strategist, who picks the stack, sets the architecture, and calls the trade-offs no one else in the room can call.
3. The engineering manager, who hires, fires, structures teams, runs one-on-ones, and owns delivery.
4. The executive, who sits in the board room, presents technology risk to investors, and makes capital-allocation decisions about R&D.

In a Series-B American startup, one person does all four. That’s the reference model most Nigerian founders have in their head when they say “CTO.”

In a pre-launch or pre-Series-A Nigerian startup, you almost never need one person doing all four. You need to figure out which one of the four you actually need this quarter — and hire specifically for that. Skipping this step is where the money burns.

Three stages, three different answers

Pre-launch — you don’t need a CTO. You need a senior engineer or a technical co-founder.

If you haven’t shipped, you don’t have technology to have strategy about. You have a set of decisions to make and code to write. What you need is someone who can do that work.

A “CTO” hire at this stage often means paying a senior salary (or handing out significant equity) to someone who then hires two juniors to do the work while they “think strategically.” Six months later, you have a product that doesn’t work, a burn rate you can’t sustain, and a founder-CTO relationship that’s already awkward because you’re both quietly wondering what they’ve been doing.

The right hire at this stage is a strong senior engineer who ships code with their own hands, or a technical co-founder who is co-owning the outcome. Not a CTO.

Post-launch, pre-Series-A — this is where fractional CTO earns its money.

Your product is live. You have some revenue. You have engineers — probably one or two senior, a handful of juniors, and a growing sense that the technical debt is accumulating faster than you can reason about it.

You do not, at this stage, need a full-time executive drawing an executive salary to sit next to you in board meetings. Your board meetings are still small and informal. Your fundraising still runs on your voice, not your CTO’s.

What you need is senior technical judgement on a retainer. Someone who reviews your architecture, sits in on your hiring decisions for engineering roles, calls the trade-offs on the migrations you’re avoiding, and shows up to the specific investor conversations where a technical voice matters.

This is the classic fractional CTO engagement. In Nigeria, monthly retainers run from ₦800k to ₦2.5M depending on scope and seniority. That’s less than one senior engineer’s fully-loaded cost, and it buys you executive-grade technical decisions for the twenty hours a month you actually need them.

I take on a small number of these engagements myself. I limit it to two active clients at any time, and I structure the work so I’m never the bottleneck between the founder and their team’s daily shipping.

Post-Series-A — now you need a full-time CTO. Really.

At scale — meaning a real Series A, a team over twenty engineers, board reporting that includes technology risk, roadmaps that span multiple quarters — you need someone in the seat full time. This is the moment when the four jobs of a CTO can no longer be part-time.

But by this stage, the right answer is often to promote from within, not to hire externally. The senior engineer or engineering manager who has been closest to the codebase, who knows the customers, who has been managing your team’s day-to-day — they usually have more of what you need than an external hire who has to learn all of it from scratch.

The exception: when the internal senior doesn’t want the executive parts of the role, or when their profile can’t credibly hold up in board rooms and investor conversations. In that case, external hire — but hire slowly, take references, and pay properly.

The wrong choice at each stage costs you a lot

I’ve watched three specific mistakes cost Nigerian founders significant money and time.

Mistake one: hiring a CTO too early. A founder pays 40% of their runway to a “CTO” who is really a senior engineer with a title inflated to close the offer. Six months in, the founder is frustrated the CTO isn’t shipping fast enough. The CTO is frustrated they’re being asked to code all day. Both blame each other. The equity split is now a live problem.

Mistake two: hiring an “advisor CTO” who is really a consultancy in disguise. You pay a monthly fee. They send juniors to do the actual work. Your engineering team resents them. Your product ships slower, not faster.

Mistake three: not hiring anyone senior until it’s too late. A founder tries to be their own CTO past Series A. Everything technical routes through them. When they get sick, get married, or take a founder retreat, the company grinds to a halt. Investors start asking pointed questions about key-person risk.

All three of these are avoidable if you match the hire to the stage.

The four questions I ask founders

When a founder tells me they need a CTO, I ask four questions:

1. When did you last ship a real feature? If the answer is “we haven’t launched” or “in the last month,” you need engineering capacity, not executive strategy.
2. How many engineers do you currently have on the team? Under five, you don’t need a full-time engineering executive. You need a senior engineer or a fractional CTO.
3. What are the three technology decisions on your desk right now? If you can list them, you might just need someone senior to help you decide — that’s a fractional engagement. If you can’t list them, you don’t have a CTO problem; you have a founder-clarity problem.
4. Have investors asked you specifically for a CTO, or have they asked you about technical risk? These are different questions. The first has one answer. The second has many, and full-time CTO is rarely the best one.

Most of the time, when a founder honestly answers these four questions in front of me, they realise they weren’t looking for a CTO. They were looking for a senior technical partner to help them stop being afraid of their own technology stack. That’s what a fractional engagement is for.

Sometimes it’s not a CTO. It’s clarity.

The best thing I’ve learned in eight years running Gsoft, in serving as CTO at Every27, and in taking a small number of fractional engagements: the CTO conversation is usually a proxy for a different conversation.

The real conversation is “I don’t feel confident about the technology decisions I’m making, and I’d like someone credible in the room who can help.”

That’s not a full-time CTO hire. That’s a phone call, followed by a structured working relationship, followed by a decision — three months later — about whether the arrangement should become permanent.

Try the phone call first.

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I take a small number of fractional CTO engagements each year. If you’re weighing this decision for your company, book a 30-minute call — we’ll figure out together whether it’s the right shape for you, or whether the answer is something else entirely. There’s no charge for the conversation, and I say no often.