[abraca]

My two cents is that your skillset is not quite the right match for the companies you are interviewing at, and so it's going to be tougher to find a position. Not impossible but you'll have to interview around a lot more and have a good reference (as you suggest. Basically to get a stretch position you need an "in.") The easiest jobs to get are those where you are essentially doing exactly the same thing you did before, in a similar space. So - a company doing related work, of similar size (less than 15 engineers.) It sounds like you are interviewing at much larger companies than places you have experience as a tech lead at - and it is a different skillset. Large-scale experience IS different. Tech leads at a large company do different kinds of work than a CTO at a startup. A lot of the work is around working with other tech leads, and working with cross-functional leads across the company who have growing teams of their own, managing politics, scaling etc. Figuring out communication structures, reporting up and across and so on. Other on HN could elaborate on this better than I can. To get this kind of job you have to convince the interviewers that you can work well in a huge company as a tech lead even though you haven't done that before. Find ing someone who can vouch for you in that respect (a VC, executive at the company etc) will help you get there. Good luck