Not prison, but unavailable technically. Former CTO/co-founder quit and we stepped up to maintain the company as COO and CTO and spent the year shipping to customers (we build custom enterprise applications with ML capability from data acquisition to "the javascript") while building a team that could survive if something happened to us, from how to pay taxes to how to write issues and develop product and think about the business, to how to hire and fire. After a year, new CTO was unavailable. We then started to build our ML platform and did our best to keep him informed so he could hit the ground running when he comes back, which is in a week. Woop woop!
This sounds like a good reason to hire a new CTO. If the CTO was working on full-time on something that isn't technical, their job and title should change.
No. The CTO wasn't working full time on something that is not technical. He was unavailable but not replaceable. He couldn't write code but knows what's going on, and I don't want to pollute the core team. I filled in to ensure we're fine product wise and business wise. We've seen it through and will continue to do so now he's one week away.
We're both technical but I concentrated on freeing him and the CEO from everything that I could do so they could focus on the things I can't do.