The standard corporate advice is to separate the CEO and CTO roles as soon as a company has the resources to do so. The reasoning makes sense in theory: the skills required to run a business and the skills required to lead technical development are different, and optimizing for both in one person creates bottlenecks.
I hold both titles. Here's why that's not an accident, and what it actually means in practice.
The Founder Is Not the Same as the Operator
What people miss when they apply standard org-design thinking to founding teams is this: the founder's value isn't functional. It's custodial. I'm not CEO because I'm the best person to run day-to-day sales operations I'm not, Troy does that better now. I'm CEO because I'm the keeper of the original conviction.
The companies that lose their edge after founder transitions lose it because no one is left who will fight irrationally for the founding thesis. Operators optimize. Founders protect. Those are different jobs.
Where I'm Still Involved
My operating model is simple: I'm fully in until I'm not needed, and then I back out.
Sales: I'm ancillary. Troy runs it. He has the relationships, the process, the team. I don't need to be in those rooms anymore.
Manufacturing: We have a strong team, most recruited from Michigan's automotive industry. They know how to build. I'm involved in budget, not operations.
Technology and product: I'm still close. Architecture decisions, platform direction, what we build next these still require my direct involvement. Not because I lack confidence in the team, but because the technical vision is the founding vision. Those two things have to stay coupled until they don't.
The CTO Role Is Different Than It Looks
My CTO function is less about writing code or managing sprints and more about maintaining the line between what we're building and what we originally set out to prove. The drift risk in technology companies is real the engineering team solves problems in front of them, and sometimes the problems in front of them aren't the problems that matter most.
The founder-as-CTO keeps those two things aligned. When they come apart, you build a very sophisticated version of the wrong thing.
I'll hand off both roles eventually. When the right person exists who can hold the vision without me needing to be in the room when I trust the institutional memory more than my own presence I'll step back. We're not there yet.