What You Need to Step Up as a CTO with Etienne de Bruin, founder of 7CTOs

Today, we're catching up with Seven CTOs founder Etienne about his framework for CTOs and the upcoming 0111 Conference. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:17) Tell me about this. You know, this is news to me, the CTO Levels. I literally went to your LinkedIn page to see if I could get the 0111 logo, and I saw this new CTO Levels project, and I thought to myself, how have we not talked about this? The only time I've heard you mention CTO Levels, I thought it was in the context of some type of program you ran inside of Seven CTOs as, like, a coaching thing.

(Etienne at 00:00:43) Yes. You know, CTO Levels kind of developed a life of its own. I initially created it because I was having a real problem leveling people inside of peer groups. And I think you and I both know we've talked to thousands of CTOs. What is a CTO? It depends on the stage of the company, and blah blah blah. You know, technical CTO, not so. There's just so many nuances around the role that me, as a peer group organization, had a real problem, which was people want to join the organization. It's a high-end organization, and I was having a real problem trying to match people and put them in the right forums because sometimes even an enterprise CTO wants to be with the brutally early startups because they want to have innovative thoughts and thinking. So I developed CTO Levels to be able to say almost instantly what level your company needs to be at based on two things: the people size of that reports into the CTO, the team size, and the budget that's been allocated for that team.

(Etienne at 00:01:59) Using only those two numbers, I can tell you, hey, CEO, your company is supposed to be operating at level six. Then I do an assessment with the CTO, and we do a traffic light assessment, and it's red, green, and yellow. And wherever they hit their first reds, that's where we say, but your tech organization is stuck at level two. So I have this brilliant six slash two thing going on. You should be at a six, and the CEO understands levels, like a number. Oh, I should be at six. But then we're able to share with the CEO, the company, with the help of the CTO, where the organization is stuck at. And that could be things like, hey, I'm at level six, so I should be having psychological safety. I should be having team topologies. I should be having a VP of engineering, just off the top of my head. And let's say, for instance, you're not able to hire your VP of engineering. Like, hey, Etienne, can you please coach me because we can't hire a VP of engineering? The first thing I say, well, let's go look at your levels. And the problem that they're facing more often than not has got nothing to do with the hiring funnel and the blah blah blah. It's all the things that have been neglected in the lower levels. And so, initially, I wanted it to just be a leveling exercise so we can put the same or the level-adjacent people into the same forums.

(Etienne at 00:03:39) Now I've built a whole open source—well, I guess it's free for all. At ctolevels.com, you can actually go. It's a public Notion, and it has the whole levels broken down, all the playbooks, all the documents you need to actually be a great CTO according to the Levels framework. And for that, I co-founded a company because there's just more work. There's too much work. And also I am good in certain things and bad in other things. I'm good in vision and really terrible in details. So I co-founded CTO Levels with Cathy Keating and Scott Graves, and the three of us are now the curators of what's happening inside of Levels. And from that, we're going to launch a licensing program, a certification program. And I'm hoping that finally, a non-institutionalized certification program where CTOs can genuinely go and study how to be a great CTO. Well, that was a long answer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:55) That's super interesting, though. Ctolevels.com.

(Etienne at 00:04:59) And you can scroll down to the—yeah, you can on each one of those levels, you can click and you'll read up on what the things are.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:09) And honestly, the framework's very impressive. I remember that graphic you shared a long time ago, the CTO Levels. It was like an earlier version of what's on your own page.

(Etienne at 00:05:16) You actually, through our friendship, you actually saw one of the very early iterations of it. Yeah. And what's been amazing is while I do take credit for creating this framework, the high level of it, it's been unbelievable to see, you know, Cathy's level 10 plus experience come in, and actually, she's writing a lot of those blocks. Scott has got insane fractional CTO experience, and so garnering from the industry and upgrading the playbooks and the documents has been insane.

(Etienne at 00:05:52) So, really, any tech organization who honestly, any tech organization who just wants to get a sense of industry, where they are, and where they should be, this assessment is growing stronger every month as we do more and more of these assessments. So like I said, I'm very proud of it. I do want to Brené Brown the shit out of this. So I want fractional CTOs using this, getting licensed, getting certified. I want people to feel really proud even on LinkedIn. Hey, I'm in level so-and-so CTO. But, you know, this is the other thing. It's not an aspirational thing. I mean, we're not saying you should all be level 10 CTOs. We're saying a level 10 CTO is just a very different CTO to a level three, and you might never want to be at the level 10 because that's just the stuff that you don't actually want to do. You want to be in startup land, and you want to innovate and do sort of unspecced work. You're in the lower levels. If you're starting to scale and go multinational and you're starting to, you know, be sort of a sales-oriented CTO, you're probably going to aim for the higher levels.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:03) Well, I mean, it makes sense, right? It's a good way to check against your peers and the industry, the maturity of your organization in relationship to the maturity of the line of business. Right?

(Etienne at 00:07:17) Absolutely. And we've had more conversations now with CEOs who also understand the framework, not maybe not the intricacies of the framework, but, you know, it's two numbers. It's fairly simple to understand that. And so it's been crazy. I mean, I feel like I've had it forever. This is how much work has gone into it, and it's only been, like, maybe a year or two that it's had this incarnation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:47) Well, let's talk about the 0111 Conference.

(Etienne at 00:07:51) I had—

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:52) I had to make sure I get all the ones in there. I had to look at the graphic.

(Etienne at 00:07:54) Hey, I have the ones. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:56) What is that conference? When is it? And how can people buy tickets?

(Etienne at 00:08:01) Well, I am super thankful. I know we are rushing this conversation a little bit, so I appreciate your time and squeezing this in. 0111 is our annual CTO conference. Seven CTOs, as we all know, is a peer group membership organization. So once a year, we invite all our CTOs to come to San Diego in November and spend some time together. And, you know, I am sort of a led-by-my-heart kind of guy, so it's a heart-centered tech community. So the conference reflects that. So there's a lot of work that happens, you know, just sort of on our being and how we show up as well as some tech forward thinking. So two days. The first day, we focus a bit on building your business. We're going to go through some workshops around let's go through an M&A exercise together, and we're going to have some worksheets and actually do, like, a due diligence together. We're going to talk about some time management tricks in the business. Anything that sort of raises your business acumen. And then on the second day, we're going to go deep on AI with a few experts in the field, not only pontificating about it, but, like, we're going to open our laptops, and we're going to fine-tune some LLMs together. It's going to demystify a lot of all the AI hype right now with CTOs who eat and sleep and have been drinking AI or, I guess, neural networks for 10-plus years, all the way to CTOs who have used these tools that are available today to actually have a business impact in their companies. And so a lot of CTOs, I find, and I'm sure you see this as well, is, you know, there's a plethora of tools coming out. The VC industry is backing this, like, crazy. So it's a really tough time right now to decide what am I doing, why am I doing it. And then, of course, there's this whole issue with your data. So we're going to answer all those questions together at 0111 in a workshop-style conference. We only have about 100 people, you know, sometimes 150 people, depends on just each year.

(Etienne at 00:10:30) So up to about 150 people. So it's a small intimate affair. We're going to go to the Hard Rock Hotel Downtown San Diego, and people can go to 0111conf.com to get some tickets.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:49) Do we have a special code for Modern CTO listeners?

(Etienne at 00:10:52) Yes. MCTO. We will have an MCTO coupon code where people—we love it when guests. So people ask me, is it only for Seven CTOs members? Am I going to be recruited? Absolutely not. This is not a sales conference. This is really like a homecoming vibe where our members come from all around the world. They're happy to see each other. They spend a lot of time on Zoom calls as they do their forums, their monthly meetings. So this has got a real homely vibe of people who really, you know, are in relationship with each other.

(Etienne at 00:11:29) And I love it when guests come because we get to know new and interesting people who can also share when we do the workshops together. So do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:40) Yeah. I can actually speak a little bit to that. While I haven't been to the 0111 Conference specifically, I have been to Etienne's Seven CTOs events. And even there, they're not like recruity and pushy or anything like that. Everyone's just kind of hanging out, having a good time and, yeah, it's definitely the environment that you describe it as.

(Etienne at 00:12:00) Thank you. That was when we were doing—

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:03) The Texas thing.

(Etienne at 00:12:03) Ribs together at the Salt Lick.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:06) Yes. Ribs at the Salt Lick. Yeah. That was a lot of fun.

(Etienne at 00:12:09) Were you already in Nashville then, or were you still cruising the—

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:12) I was still cruising around.

(Etienne at 00:12:15) Were you secretly trying to find a new place to move to? Was that like—I wasn't aware that you were actually looking at relocating, or was that not on there?

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:24) I didn't know what we were doing. The moment we decided to not do the RV thing, we were in North Carolina at the time, and it was snowing, and we couldn't get the RV to be really warm. And it was about six in the morning, and we're laying there next to each other. We're freezing. And I just said, I think we're done. It's been about a year. I think we're good, and we need to not be cold. And we went on Zillow and bought a house the next day. We also made the decision between continuing for a year, like, trying to go somewhere warm, get the RV somewhere warm, or having another child and we're like, we've got to go for child three because you don't want to be pregnant in an RV. That's for sure. Right?

(Etienne at 00:13:04) You know, weather-based decisions, I mean, we did that as well. I mean, when we moved to Germany, we didn't realize that we were moving to the town with the highest average rainfall in the whole of Germany. And, you know, when you hear that cognitively, you're like, oh, you know, we'll make it work. But then you start realizing, hang on, there's actually a deficiency. You actually get sadder by the week. And here's the worst part about that is you don't actually realize what's going on. You just think that you're becoming a depressed person and you're questioning the meaning of life. No. It's just that your skin needs some sunlight.

(Etienne at 00:13:45) And the day I realized this was when we went to a—they were forecasting good weather, still overcast. So we and it was hot. So we decided to go to a public pool and swim with the Germans. And dude, there was a moment where the clouds parted ways and the sun shone through and the beams hit my skin. And I felt a joy that I was like, oh my goodness. This is, this has been what's been going on. So within months, we left that town and we moved to San Diego. Yeah. But thank you, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:27) Special code, 0111conf.com, correct? And special code is MCTO, like Modern CTO.

(Etienne at 00:14:35) And if you go to the website, you'll see accommodation options. You'll see some insights into the speakers, and, more than the speakers, it's going to be a great vibe. You're going to be with your people, and you're going to shake my hand.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:50) And it's a $12,000 ticket with a $13,000 discount. So—

(Etienne at 00:14:57) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:57) Every time you fill out a form, Etienne's going to send you $1,000.

(Etienne at 00:15:03) This is how you do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:06) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn, or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.