Then right now you should be negotiating toward contract executive level pay for the given company size.

Don't be tempted to sell yourself cheap in the hopes of goodwill or some other f'd up rose colored outcome during equity discussion.

Usually if you aren't cofounder you are going to get a pretty crappy chunk of equity and should be viewed as a lottery ticket and nothing more.

Sounds like standard market rates should be your goal.

So it's basically a high end contract with a chance to go full-time?

If that's the case, I'd go $20k-$30k /month as a good starting rate for an executive level technical contractor.

Are people really making that in this situation? Sounds awfully expensive in my experience.

EDIT: I get that people can rationalize that amount, but are people you know of actually getting it. I, for one, would have a very, very hard time paying someone $60k in cash for two months of early stage "CTO" work (and a very, very easy time taking it). But I'm more interested in the facts: are people actually paying short term contrators at early stage startups $20k-30k/month?

Contractor implies that you're getting no benefits and you're paying up the self-employment tax instead of the company.

For a CTO-level position, at a startup that's raised a Series A? You bet I'd want that much money. Assuming a typical start-up level workload, that works out to somewhere around $80 and $120 an hour, which is pretty reasonable for CTO-level talent, considering the higher tax burden and the need to secure your own health insurance.

EDIT: Yes, certain (funded and/or profitable) startups will pay this much (or the equivalent in salary and benefits) for a talented CTO. Note that this implies actual CTO-level work and not "oh, I'm just going to call my first developer hire the CTO to flatter his ego because he's the only technical guy on staff." (That sort of title inflation you should run from - it's just going to cause HR trouble when the company grows and needs a real CTO, and it's usually offered in lieu of an appropriate salary.) If you're putting "CTO" in quotes, you need to hire a developer, not a CTO.

I doubt it. It sounds extremely expensive to me as well. You might make that as an "executive level technical contractor" for a major software firm, but probably not for a startup that's just getting funded. At small startups, there are often a lot of people with CXO titles, and it doesn't really mean much.

On contract a good engineer can easily make $125 an hour (5k a week, ~20k a month) a CTO should be higher then that, so not this is not expensive. Remember this is contract and there is no equity on the table.

First of all, there is no such thing as a contract CTO. If you are contract then you don't have a title or any stake in the company, ask for market wages for your skill set and experience. For 80-120 an hour you are a Sr programmer with expert level experience in your specific field as an independant contractor. Note, this doesn't mean you've built 2 websites with Rails and don't know shit about scale or performance. If they have no other technical people on staff and are BS'ing you with a title, run away, this isn't going to work out for you.

I'd have to disagree. My companies CTO of over 2 years is on a contract and doesn't touch code and I would describe as being in a typical CTO/executive role.

so does a CTO need to have coding skills? Or just directing based on his/her technology vision? In my understanding, a CTO needs to know at least some coding and can verify their subordinate code and fix bugs, so forth