This week, I’ve been looking at the evolution of tech startups. The journey from two or three co-founders to an exit or an acquisition is long and arduous, and it turns out that a lot of VCs aren’t particularly picky about who sits in the CTO seat at company formation. That’s a bad idea. Some CTOs are extraordinary and able to build the first MVP version of a startup’s product pretty much single-handedly and then grow into an executive-level strategic leader.

In many cases, however, that’s not what happens, and the CTO was basically the smartest person with a CS degree standing close to the CEO when the company was formed. The end result is that a lot of startups wind up giving a huge chunk of equity to someone who is essentially doing a job a semi-decent engineer could have done. If the company exits for a billion dollars, that means that short-sighted VCs who refuse to invest unless there’s a technical person on the founding team are effectively pushing startups into putting hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of equity in incompetent hands.It’s a phenomenon that happens surprisingly often, and it’s time that VCs get as savvy about the tech as they are about the market and financial side of company building.

On that cheerful and highly opinionated note, let’s see what’s happening in the rest of startup land this week!