The CTO Substack

The CTO Substack

The CTO’s Translation Failure

Why being technically correct can cost you your job—and what I wish I’d known about showing complex work simply

Etienne de Bruin's avatar
Etienne de Bruin
Dec 10, 2025
∙ Paid

I’m sitting across from my CEO and CFO in 2018. The air is thick with excitement. They want to build our own real-time video content distribution network. In-house. From scratch.

The reasoning sounds compelling enough. More flexibility. Better control over costs. No more dependency on third-party platforms. They’ve done the math on paper and the numbers …

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