Haha. “CTO in small startup” can easily mean 3 friends got together and tried to make an app in moms basement, while giving each other fancy roles.

Never look at titles alone. Their scope vary wildly across companies. Even in big corporations they can be used by friends patting each other on the back or to make employees feel important as an alternative to giving an actual raise.

I understand the problem of ridiculously inflated titles (like “VP Alliance and Strategic Partnerships World…” for the first employee doing sales) but on the other hand I don’t really see an alternative for CEO and CTO, what would be more appropriate titles for co founders for small startups?

"CTO" in particular is almost a running gag in the consulting arena as nearly everyone over 40 seems to be a former CTO somewhere.

Depends on the startup to be fair.

While it might have been a young CTO at a small startup, the field of technology is vast, it's not the job of the CTO to understand all aspects of it.

Similarly, when I started in Engineering, I didn't understand quite how much complexity existed in all the other areas of running a company, I've since learned much about them and have much more respect for CEO's who have to manage all of those issues.

more naive to even badmouth your manager in an interview. She could be in the right but that's a very risky move.

It wasn't an interview. I never said that so not sure where you got that.

It was in a 1:1 where she was specifically seeking out advice on how to deal with this manager