Primary goal of CTO's is to make sure that the technology serves the business.
As C-suite, you are also involved in setting the company strategy and are responsible for building the technical organization to own it.
Outside of executing the core strategy you can take an opportunistic approach to:
1/ create more strategic options for the company
2/ cut costs by automating or re-engineering business processes
3/ deliver an unfair technical advantage over competitors
4/ improve reliability of service
5/ introduce more technology in the rest of the business (sales, marketing, operations, ..)
Startup CTO's tend to combine many different roles as there are more roles than people to fulfill them. Generally startup CTO's wind up also doing product management, engineering management (people, culture), recruitment, SCRUM master, IT, support, BI, architecting and programming.
What you actually wind up doing depends on the needs of the business and the available talent in the company to delegate these roles to.
Outside of executing the core strategy you can take an opportunistic approach to:
1/ create more strategic options for the company
2/ cut costs by automating or re-engineering business processes
3/ deliver an unfair technical advantage over competitors
4/ improve reliability of service
5/ introduce more technology in the rest of the business (sales, marketing, operations, ..)
Startup CTO's tend to combine many different roles as there are more roles than people to fulfill them. Generally startup CTO's wind up also doing product management, engineering management (people, culture), recruitment, SCRUM master, IT, support, BI, architecting and programming.
What you actually wind up doing depends on the needs of the business and the available talent in the company to delegate these roles to.