The World Is Flat, Stupid: Time for America to Hire a CTO

The role of a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in a company is an incredibly critical, but poorly understood one. Unless a member of the founding team is a strong technology visionary that occupies that role, many start-ups neglect the position. Instead, they assume the CIO or VP of Engineering can be responsible for setting technology strategy as well as delivering on it – an impossible burden even for the most talented technology manager. Within our portfolio, I have always been an advocate of separating the two positions: an internally-facing VP of Engineering or CIO, who is responsible for delivering the goods on time and on budget on an operational, quarterly and annual basis; and an externally-facing CTO, who is looking over the horizon to set strategic direction and establish the priorities of where to invest taking into account how the world will look in 3-5 years.

Therefore, I read Lotus founder, Mitch Kapor’s call for the next President to hire a CTO for America in MIT’s Technology Review with great interest. Historically, America has never had a CTO. The President’s Science Advisory Committee, which had great prominence when it was first established in 1957 during America’s “Sputnik moment” under Presidents Eisenhower, has had little influence and visibility since Nixon abolished the committee in 1973 and it returned under President Ford in a weakened form. Yet technology strategy and policy permeates so many of the critical issues the country faces today: from energy policy to defense, from education to homeland security and obviously the big elephant in the room in any budget debate – health care.