CTO
CTO Realty Growth, Inc.
stock NYSE

Biggest reversal $bork CTO

It just takes 1 CTO, CEO and board to start the dominos.

I see it because I snort tokens, but normal people don't. I've worked in SaaS sales for a long time and 90% of the buyers like to wank around at these big marketing events and talk about AI but what they end up doing is the most mundane shit possible because believe it or not, the CTO and everyone below them can't in fact handle that shit. Most enterprises - the ones who are creating 80%+ of SaaS revenue - are working with 2014 technology.
People who are in charge of responsibly purchasing software for their companies are going to SaaS events and wearing Salesforce T Shirts dude

I'm the CEO of a company, I find out that somebody else brought the processes back in house. What the fuck do I have a CTO for if they can't handle an extra project that is going to save SaaS line items. In fact, what the fuck am I doing in the job if I don't ask the question. What is the board of directors doing if they don't see other companies develop E2E systems and reducing reliance on SaaS? How can you not see what is about to happen.

CEO to CTO> Can you bring this in house?

Biggest reversal $bork CTO

It just takes 1 CTO, CEO and board to start the dominos.

I see it because I snort tokens, but normal people don't. I've worked in SaaS sales for a long time and 90% of the buyers like to wank around at these big marketing events and talk about AI but what they end up doing is the most mundane shit possible because believe it or not, the CTO and everyone below them can't in fact handle that shit. Most enterprises - the ones who are creating 80%+ of SaaS revenue - are working with 2014 technology.
People who are in charge of responsibly purchasing software for their companies are going to SaaS events and wearing Salesforce T Shirts dude

I'm the CEO of a company, I find out that somebody else brought the processes back in house. What the fuck do I have a CTO for if they can't handle an extra project that is going to save SaaS line items. In fact, what the fuck am I doing in the job if I don't ask the question. What is the board of directors doing if they don't see other companies develop E2E systems and reducing reliance on SaaS? How can you not see what is about to happen.

CEO to CTO> Can you bring this in house?

Lots of reasons. But primarily when you’re a large company and you’re the CIO or CTO you want to buy a proven, stable, and secure platform to cover your ass. There are more reasons to buy the “safe choice” than to save a few bucks and go with a smaller competitor or open source or roll-your-own-with-AI alternative.
Nobody ever got fired for buying Salesforce or Atlassian or Microsoft. Because it was the default play.

Agreed. He's been impressive since the get-go. Anytime he contributed to the earnings calls while still CTO was great; he has the ability to break down the technical into easily understandable terms, and clearly has a strong understanding of the auto industry. Elevating De Vos to CEO feels like a huge step in legitimizing MVIS.

for real. it strikes me that most people are focusing on tech while completely forgetting this crucial human dynamics. " no bank CTO is going to look at a blog post from anthropic and go "yeah let's have the AI rewrite our entire transaction processing system, what could go wrong." --> so true, let's jeopardize a big salary and stock options plan to chase the latest tech trend.

Claude isn't making new software. It is translating software from Cobol to Java. LLMs are actually very good at translation.
Large companies have decades of legacy code in Cobol. It costs a fortune to run it on IBM hardware, and it's almost impossible to find good developers. Projects to convert or rewrite that code used to take years, longer than the average CTO tenure. Now we're talking months. It doesn't matter who you are, "successfully migrated all legacy systems from mainframe, reducing operating costs in 90%" will look great on your resume.

Yeah good call, I was just checking last year and saw your comment so perfect timing. Almost the exact same thing happened Feb 19-21 2025. Same people, same window. CEO sold \~$1.95M, CTO \~$375K, CFO \~$670K, CDO \~$660K, CLO \~$624K. Even Fritz Prinz the co-founder sold $67K. Then another round in early March. So this is almost certainly must be tied to an annual RSU vesting schedule, mid February every year, with 10b5-1 plans set up to auto sell on vest to cover taxes. The bulk selling isn't discretionary. That said two things still stand out to me. One, nobody has cancelled their 10b5-1 plan which is what you'd expect if something was brewing. And two, Straubel's Dec and Jan sells are on a completely different cadence from the vesting schedule. Those are his own separate planned sales and he's been doing them monthly at lower and lower prices.

No one ever gets fired for hiring IBM to maintain and support their legacy systems though.
The procurement officer and CTO might get fired for hiring Claude to do it.

the fact that a single CTO was the barrier between workers and AI job loss sounds more scary to me then nice to see but you're the expert on this one

Yeah none of cobol or your machines are special sorry. Your CTO is probably trying to save his own job for a bit