Technology
**alphalist.CTO Podcast – For CTOs and Technical Leaders**

This podcast features interviews of CTOs and other technical leadership figures and topics range from technology (AI, blockchain, cyber, DevOps, Web Architecture, etc.) to management (e.g. scaling, structuring teams, mentoring, technical recruiting, product etc.).
Guests from leading tech companies share their best practices and knowledge.
The goal is to support other CTOs on their journey through tech and engineering, inspire and allow a sneak-peek into other successful companies to understand how they think and act. Get awesome insights into the world‘s top tech companies, personalities with this podcast brought to you by Tobias Schlottke.

Latest Episodes:

#18 - Jean-Denis Greze // Head of Engineering at Plaid Jan 28, 2021

Show notes

Podcast time! In this episode I'm chatting with Jean-Denis Greze, the Head of Engineering @ Plaid and former Director of Engineering at Dropbox. Plaid is a fintech Unicorn from the US that just turned down an acquisition by Visa.

We spoke about:

The upcoming topic 🔒 Privacy Engineering 🔒 and how it will change our thinking
How plaid handles 1000s of connections to banks and integrates with a lot of legacy APIs just fine
His thoughts around Defi and Blockchain
How they do good business in fintech without touching any money 💰

It was great having you, Jean-Denis!

#17 - Eric Bowman // SVP Engineering TomTom Jan 14, 2021

Show notes

This time in the podcast I have a very bright guest I admire for years: Eric Bowman, SVP Engineering at TomTom, Former VP Engineering at Zalando AND one of the developers behind the game "The Sims" 🧍‍♂️ He is a brilliant mind when it comes to tech leadership and has strong opinions on autonomy and empowerment.

Topics we touched:

How 90s gaming development compares to 20s large scale tech teams
What TomTom does these days and the technical challenges in location based services & mapping these days
How to establish tech culture and open source in a large enterprise
The challenges of the automotive industry in a software world 🚗
📈 The importances of the accelerate KPIs in modern engineering orgs and how to move fast 📈

It was a pleasure talking to you, Eric!

#16 - Tyler McMullen // CTO Fastly Dec 17, 2020

Show notes

This time, I have a very technical podcast on Webassembly and the new kid on the block: the Edge Cloud with Fastly's CTO Tyler McMullen, one of the leading CDNs and edge cloud companies out there.

The future of distributed computation: From Serverless to ☁️ Cloudless ☁️
Webassembly as the new industry standard intermediate representation/micro container. And guess what? Your browser most likely already supports it!
How a CDN works internally and the challenges of building it
How he manages to still be a coding geek in 💰💰💰 10BN company

This podcast was actually recorded shortly before Covid - if you wonder how we could meet up in Berlin ;-)

#15 - Jean Michel Lemieux // CTO Shopify Dec 03, 2020

Show notes

This time I had Jean Michel Lemieux or short JML, the CTO of 🛒 Shopify 🛒 in the podcast. Craziest fact: He took the time two days before black Friday 💥. In the podcast he also told me why.

We spoke about:

His fight against crazy 👟 sneaker - sniping - bots and how Shopify keeps people in line happy with games
What it takes to run the largest Ruby on Rails (majestic ;-)) monolith on the planet
Why he does not believe in microservice architecture but still runs some services
How he keeps his 2000 engineer army aligned
Why he still sells stuff for kids online through his own platform

It was crazy fun, even if I missed the swearing after David Heinemeier Hansson took that route.

#14 - David Heinemeier Hansson // CTO Basecamp, inventor of Ruby on Rails, bestselling author & Race driver Nov 19, 2020

Show notes

How he built Ruby on Rails. how he believes in deep focus & zero distractions

In this episode I am thrilled to welcome David Heinemeier Hansson, CTO of Basecamp, inventor of Ruby on Rails, founder of Hey.com, book author of books like "Remote" or "It does not have to be crazy at work".

Some topics we touched:

* How David Discovered the magic of Ruby 💎
* How he finds moments of deep flow in programming and racing
* Why Smartwatches are a gift from hell⌚
* Why the 60 hour work week is a stupid lie
* Why he would immediately quit if he was hired as CTO of Zalando 👚
* How they successfully manage Basecamp, and why "the Spotify Model" is a myth

☠️ Strong language, be careful ☠️ And: You might notice that I had to laugh at least 60% of the time. Thanks David for your time and this great episode.

#13 Matthias Laug // CTO & Co-Founder at TIER mobility Nov 05, 2020

Show notes

Podcast time! This time I have the chance to talk to the judo brown belt owning CTO of the scooter& mobility startup TIER mobility Matthias Laug. Before TIER he co-founded Lieferando and boy, he's a nice guest to talk to. We spoke about: * Why he puts people over tech * What they use to run their large IoT stack * His vision of Scooters talking to each other in a huge mesh * Why he after founding Lieferando and having a large exit still started at Thoughtworks * When to not do backflips even if you perfected doing them He also briefly mentions Eric Bowman, Martin Fowler and Pat Kua who have one thing in common: I did not interview them for the alphalist podcast - Would be happy to chat with you guys too! :)

#12 with Johannes Schaback // CTO at Home24 Oct 22, 2020

Show notes

This time I am talking to my friend Johannes Schaback, CTO of Home24, who is also originally a co-founder of alphalist and one of the brightest minds in the German engineering, tech and business-tech scene. We are talking about his journey through the AI and data world, the Do's and Don'ts and the real world, no bullshit application of machine learning. We are Tackle: * Data is the new oil - wrong or right? * The machine learning models @ Home24 * How ML-infrastructure evolved in the last decade * The necessity to spend more time in the problem space before entering the solution space We talk about mentorship and great people he learned from (*ping* Marc Appelhoff, Brigitte Wittekind, Christian Weiss, Philipp Kreibohm ;-)). Thanks a lot Johannes and looking forward to track your successes at Home24, your career and investments.

#11 with Ahti Heinla // Co-founder & CTO at Starship Technologies Oct 08, 2020

Show notes

In this podcast, it's all about complicated things and my guest masters them all: IoT, Robotics, AI and customer acquisition. Ahti Heinla is former founding engineer of Skype and now runs Starship Technologies as Founder and CTO. In this podcast we talk about

Robotics as the coolest thing to build as an engineer
How I stopped one of his Robots in Hamburg
The hard things about robots 🤖
The hard things about bringing ML models to production

Thanks again Ahti for being my guest and looking forward to see more and more of your robots in the wild. Great to see so much innovation coming from Estonia. Looking forward to feedback and guest proposals.

#10 with Marty Cagan // Partner at Silicon Valley Product Group Sep 17, 2020

Show notes

Wow, my guest this time is able to see through the matrix 💊: It's Marty Cagan, inventor of product discovery and best selling author of the book "INSPIRED", one of the partners of the Silicon Valley Product Group and potentially the biggest eye opener for 90% of the delivery organizations out there: We are most likely doing our job wrong! He saw so much different product and delivery orgs from Apple to Google to Spotify and talks about his learnings: * How agile is interpreted wrong in 90% of the companies * How modern organizations waste their resources * How to tackle product discovery and user testing * Autonomy vs. Empowerment Thanks Marty, it's been a blast!

Christian Hardenberg // CTO Delivery Hero Sep 03, 2020

Show notes

How to scale an Engineering Team and more

I spoke to Christian Hardenberg, CTO of Delivery Hero 🍔 and formerly Rocket Internet 🚀 on how to scale an engineering org from 200 to 2000 people. Delivery Hero just entered the DAX a week ago and is worth almost 20 BN as of today. He shared his perspective and thoughts on:

How to measure software developers at scale
How they keep up the pace / velocity
What he thinks about OKRs
How they manage to integrate all the acquired entities and teams
Their secret sauce and why he thinks it is better than Google

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