If you’re a CTO, there’s a good chance you ignore LinkedIn. You might think it’s a platform for recruiters, salespeople, or brand-building CEOs. Maybe you spend more time on Twitter, where the dev jokes are sharper and news travels faster. I get it.
But here’s the problem: you’re missing the compounding power of visibility. Not just for your company, but for yourself.
LinkedIn is where many buying decisions get made. It’s where investors validate technical founders, where engineering leaders discover your point of view, and where buyers come to evaluate whether you’re credible.
And in early-stage or high-growth companies, the CTO isn’t a background player. You’re a driver of product strategy, technical culture, and company narrative. But only if people can see you.
Why most CTOs default to Twitter — and why that’s a problem
Twitter feels safer. It’s casual, full of peers, and often anonymous. You can drop a hot take or share a Stack Overflow link and get a few laughs or likes from people who get it. But LinkedIn isn’t just for hot takes or proudly announcing how ‘thrilled’ and ‘excited’ you are all the time. It’s for context, reputation, and long-term influence. Twitter might earn you street cred, but LinkedIn gets you capital, candidates, and career-defining opportunities — critical when you need to extend your runway.
The truth is, most of the people who can move you forward aren’t hanging out on Twitter. They’re on LinkedIn. They’re scrolling between meetings, looking for smart people with technical depth and leadership clarity. They’re researching before calls. They’re evaluating your track record long before they meet you. And if the only thing they find is a two-line bio and a profile photo from 2015, you’re out of the race.
The CTO as a growth engine
The CEO might be the external face of the company, but that doesn’t mean you play second fiddle. As a CTO, your personal brand signals technical strength, clarity of vision, and thought leadership in your domain. You don’t need to ride the CEO’s coattails — you can chart your own influence.
When you speak clearly on technical decisions, future hires start to imagine what it’d be like to work with you. When you write about tradeoffs, it signals maturity to buyers who are vetting your product. When you share your thinking around your roadmap, architecture, or engineering culture, it builds trust with investors who want to back people who think in systems.
Here’s what visibility from a CTO does:
| Outcome | Impact of a Visible CTO |
| Hiring engineers | Engineers follow CTOs with strong public POVs |
| Attracting investors | VCs trust leaders who show technical clarity |
| Closing clients | Buyers trust teams that explain how things work |
| Brand positioning | Reinforces product-led culture |
| Partner confidence | Makes the org feel more mature, more stable |
You don’t need a microphone handed to you. You already have one. The question is whether you’re using it.
What to post on LinkedIn as a CTO
This is where most technical leaders get stuck. You don’t want to post fluff or share anything you wouldn’t read. That’s fair. The good news is, you don’t have to. Your job is full of moments worth capturing. You just haven’t thought of them as content yet.
Write about the tradeoff you made between two database architectures. Talk about how you onboard new engineers. Share how you manage tech debt, or why you decided to replatform part of your stack.Talk about the developer marketing books you’ve read. These aren’t just posts, but signals. Each one helps someone outside your org understand how you think.
If you’re hiring, explain how your team works. What you value. What you screen for. It’s one thing to post a job — it’s another to show engineers why they’d want to work for you. Especially the ones looking to build a developer presence and testing out engineering post ideas. If you’re fundraising, write about the technical problems you’re solving. It gives investors proof that you’re not just a builder — you’re a systems thinker who can scale. Even more crucial if you’re looking to get acquired.
Examples of CTOs and technical founders doing this well
Some CTOs are already playing this game at a high level. You don’t have to copy their style, but it’s worth studying how they show up.
Some examples:
Gergely Orosz writes daily across LinkedIn and Twitter on software engineering. DHH of 37Signals isn’t shy, either. Lee Robinson writes about Vercel’s infra. Marc Rutzen explores HelloData’s product changes. Charity Majors (honeycomb.io) highlights industry players. Irina Stanescu writes about engineering leadership. So does Gregor Ojstersek. Luca Rossi helps engineers write good code. Nikki Siapno (Canva) shares viral technical content. Mark Russinovich (Azure) writes about cloud and AI. So does Will Grannis from Google. Paul Daugherty (at Accenture for ~40 years) explores technical leadership at the board level. Danielle Merfeld ran research at GE before becoming CTO. Michael Beckley (Appian) shares reflections from 25+ years in the game. Werner Vogels (Amazon) talks about systems. Hell, simply following Lenny Rachitsky on LinkedIn will expose you to other technical and product leaders.
You get the point: many CTOs are active on LinkedIn. You wouldn’t be the first, nor would you be starting from scratch. There’s a large peer community waiting for you to join.
You don’t need their follower counts. You just need your content to show up in the right feeds. The people who matter will notice.
Addressing the most common objections
You might be thinking: I don’t have time. I don’t know what to write. I hate self-promotion. That’s fine. But let’s reframe each of those.
If you don’t have time, start small. One post every other week is enough. Think of it as async mentoring for your future team. If you don’t know what to write, start with what you’re working on. A hiring decision. A tooling debate. A lesson from scaling infra. Explain it like you would in an onboarding doc. If you hate self-promotion, don’t write about yourself. Write about the work. The ideas. The decisions.
The goal isn’t to echo your CEO or simply repost company updates. It’s to develop your own voice and presence. So that when people think of your company, they think of you as a force behind it.
Getting started without overthinking it
Start with one post. Make it simple. Talk about a tradeoff you made this month, and how you landed on your decision. Write about the hardest technical problem your team solved in the last 90 days. Share a lesson you wish you knew when you were scaling from 5 engineers to 15. Or how you’ve struggled with delegating in the past.
Keep it short and authentic. You don’t need to be a storyteller (though that helps). You just need to be a clear thinker in public. The more you write, the more your thinking compounds, the better your reputation gets, and the faster people trust you.
Final thoughts on LinkedIn for CTOs
Being a CTO isn’t just about building. It’s about representing yourself as a leader in your own right. Not in the shadow of the CEO. But alongside them, with your own set of levers and your own platform.
LinkedIn is where trust gets built at scale. If you’re not writing, someone else is. And their narrative might win over the next engineer, client, or investor you were hoping to attract.
In this market, the most visible CTOs are the ones defining what comes next. And that spotlight is wide enough for you, too.
We can help
If you want to build visibility but don’t have the time to write every post yourself, we can handle that for you. We work directly with technical founders and CTOs to translate your ideas into sharp, tactical LinkedIn content that drives hiring, inbound, and credibility.
You stay focused on the product and the team — we take care of your presence. Whether it’s weekly ghostwriting, content strategy, or distribution support, we’ll help you build the kind of public profile that brings the right people to your door.
Mo is the founder and CEO of Column Content, a thought leadership content agency that helps leaders get seen. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
