CTO Craft is a learning and mentoring community of around 9,000 CTOs, VPs of Engineering, Heads of Development, Engineering Directors, and other senior technology leaders around the world. We’ve been around since 2017, and it was originally started as a response to work we were doing as fractional CTOs, coming into startups that were failing because their technology leaders weren’t being supported in the right way.
There was a lot of burnout, unmet expectations, lack of experience and cultural issues, and we recognised pretty quickly that there needed to be a safe place for early-career leaders to come and learn how to succeed in the role. The mission is to help more technology businesses succeed by providing a layer of support for their technology leaders.
Alongside the community itself, we provide one-to-one coaching and peer mentoring groups, events, content, and resources, with much of the content direction being driven by what’s going on in the community.
What do you think makes this company unique?
CTO Craft is very touchy-feely, which is quite unusual for a professional development business. It’s a safe space to be vulnerable, which people in all leadership roles absolutely need to properly calibrate and recover from the pressures it puts on you. We’ve managed to mix technical and functional support for leaders with a focus on wellbeing, which is much more sustainable.
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How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?
The community itself has exploded since the beginning of the pandemic and continues to grow exponentially as the ecosystem continues to be challenging and the rate of new CTOs and startups continues to grow. We’ve grown the team to accommodate that growth, and to speed up the addition of new offerings.
What can we hope to see from CTO Craft in the future?
We’ve been slowly re-introducing more in-person events and activities, and that will continue this year with our first London conference at the end of May. There’ll be two CTO Craft Cons every year, as well as more of our meetups and online events.
Alongside that, we’re working on making our content even more useful – more on that will be announced later in the year, but it will further cement CTO Craft as the best place for technology leaders to build the skills they need to survive in their roles. Watch this space!
