You're right. I haven't completely settled on this yet, but I may want to take just the founder->CTO route, rather than founder->CEO. A CTO would have to deal with a lot less in sales/customer-service/etc. (I find a small dose of these fun, but couldn't tolerate them as >50% of my job.)
The extreme example of this is Steve Wozniak I think, who didn't even want to be top technical guy in his company; he just wanted to be an engineer.
A CTO would have to deal with a lot less in sales/customer-service/etc.
Not really. In fact in many cases it's the opposite.
CTO's of highly technical startups are sometimes the company's best salesman, since no one understands the technology better than them, and they are out evangelizing their product, meeting a lot of prospects.
There are quite a few companies where CTO's are glorified sales reps, but this typically happens in larger companies and not startups.
Hackers/engineers come in various flavors, some are super smart &fun, some are clueless, some suffer from NIH (not invented here), some would think its easy to build what you have, etc.
Ultimately, you have to evangelize to folks that will buy your product, that is the key :-)
The extreme example of this is Steve Wozniak I think, who didn't even want to be top technical guy in his company; he just wanted to be an engineer.