[langsa]

I think the most important trait of any CTO is to be technical enough to understand what the best choice of tools to use is to accomplish the goals of the business you are running. You will be doing all of the coding at the beginning since your co-founder is not technical, but the important thing to remember is that the choices you make now while acting as the only developer at the company will greatly influence decisions you will make later once you are able to do more CTO level duties (how many devs to hire, how easy it is to find good talent to hire, etc…)

It’s easy to just keep being a developer and making choices on how the tech stack works based on things engineers care about, but you need to be able to say no to things that don’t make sense for the business. The new engineer wants to rewrite the API in a language that no one else is familiar with for performance reasons? No. The team wants to go to a micro service architecture before you have product market for? No. There will be some cases where the answer is yes of course but it should be justified why this is needed and you need to be able to understand technically what the impact will be of each decision.