On Being a CTO at 24 in Kathmandu

I became a CTO at 24. I do not say that to brag. I say it because the title sounds a lot more impressive than the reality, and I think someone should write down the reality. In Nepal, in a small company, CTO does not mean you have a corner office and a team of architects. It means you are the person who is supposed to know, and there is nobody above you to ask.

The loneliness

That is the first thing. The loneliness. As a developer you always had someone senior to escalate to. As the technical head, you are the escalation. When a decision is genuinely hard, when both options have real downsides, you make the call and you carry it alone. If it goes wrong, it is yours. There is no one to share the weight with at 1am when you are second-guessing a database choice that the whole product now depends on.

The hardest part of leading is not the work. It is making decisions you are honestly not sure about and then committing to them anyway, fully, so the team can move.

Mentoring people older than me

Some of the people I have led were ten years older than me. Think about how strange that is. You are 24, telling someone who has been working since you were in school how the system should be structured. The trick I learned is that age is not the thing. Respect is. If you respect their experience and they respect your judgment, it works. The moment you pull rank because of a title, it dies.

I made that mistake early. I overrode an older engineer on something because I was the CTO and I could. I was right about the technical point and completely wrong about how I handled it. I lost trust I had to spend months rebuilding. Being right is worthless if you are right in a way that makes people stop wanting to work with you.

Imposter syndrome is not a phase

People talk about imposter syndrome like it is a thing you grow out of. I have not. I just got used to operating with it sitting in the room. Every architecture review, part of my brain whispers that someone with a real CS pedigree from a real institution would do this better. Maybe they would. But they are not here, and the work still needs doing, and over time I noticed that my decisions were mostly working out. The whisper got quieter. It never left.

Nepal startup culture

Leading technically here is its own thing. You are not just choosing a stack. You are choosing a stack that you can hire for in a small talent pool, that runs on infrastructure you can actually afford in rupees, that survives power cuts and flaky internet. The fancy answer from a Silicon Valley blog is often the wrong answer here. I have learned to translate global best practices into local reality, and that translation is half the job.

What nobody tells you

• You will spend more time on people than on code, and you will not have been trained for the people part at all.
• Your job is to be wrong less often than the cost of indecision. Perfect is not on the menu.
• The team watches how you handle failure more than how you handle success. Stay calm when it breaks.
• Saying "I do not know, let me find out" builds more trust than pretending. It took me too long to learn that.

Would I do it again

Yes. It aged me, in good ways and bad. I am a better engineer because I had to own outcomes instead of just tasks. But if you are about to step into a role like this young, know that the title is the smallest part. The real job is carrying uncertainty without passing the weight of it onto your team. That is the whole thing. Everything else is just code.