105: The CTO's real job when agents write the code (belief reversal)
About this episode
The episode discusses the evolving role of CTOs in the AI era, emphasizing business understanding over technical mastery.
A founder went from zero to $10 million ARR in six months with six engineers and fifty agents, and the gap between idea and shipped feature was nine hours. Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com - the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. Most CTOs think going deeper on the tech is how they win this AI wave. My guest this week thinks that instinct is working against them. Nat (Rajesh) Natarajan is COO at G-P and has had a front row seat to every major platform shift since he helped found Travelocity in 1995, which is why his read on this moment carries weight. He's convinced this shift is bigger than the internet, mobile, and cloud combined. But the CTOs who pull ahead won't be the ones with the deepest technical mastery. They'll be the ones who understand the business well enough to know which problems are actually worth solving. Nat shared a story about a founder who went from zero to $10 million ARR in six months, with six engineers and roughly fifty agents doing the work. The gap between a customer idea and shipped capability was nine hours. That's…
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- 101: Why Most Leadership Assessments Are Measuring the Wrong Thing
- 100: Why AI Is Quietly Draining Your Senior Engineer Pipeline
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