Geeks Who Lead Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Short Byte: Lee Edwards - How to pick the right tech startup Feb 19, 2021

Show notes

Short Byte: Lee Edwards - How to pick the right tech startup

Whether you’re thinking of founding, joining or investing in an early stage tech company, Lee Edwards has some advice! From effective due diligence on an early stage company to some interesting focus areas for deep tech startups. Lee is a partner at Root Ventures - a hard tech seed VC, and was previously CTO/VPE at Teespring and an Engineering Manager at Groupon.

Special thanks to our global partner – Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS offers a broad set of global cloud-based products to equip technology leaders to build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.

And thanks to our sustaining partners:

CodeClimate - Engineering leaders who are motivated to exceed 2021 goals know that gut-feel isn't enough to make performance-improving decisions. CTOs, VPEs and Directors at organizations like Slack, Gusto, Pizza Hut trust objective data from Code Climate Velocity to measure and improve productivity, efficiency and performance. Reach out to Code Climate and get a month free when you mention CTO Connection.

Karat - Karat helps companies hire software engineers by designing and conducting technical interview programs that improve hiring signal, mitigate bias, and reduce the interviewing time burden on engineering teams. Check out this short video or visit Karat.com to learn how we can help you grow your team.

LaunchDarkly - the Feature Management Platform Powering the Best Software Products
Our vision is to eliminate risk for developers and operations teams from the software development cycle. As companies transition to a world built on software, there is an increasing requirement to move quickly—but that often comes with the desire to maintain control. LaunchDarkly is the feature management platform that enables dev and ops teams to control the whole feature lifecycle, from concept to launch to value. Learn more at https://launchdarkly.com/

CTO Connection is a community where senior engineering leaders can connect with and learn from their peers!

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Short Byte: Johnny Ray Austin Measuring outcomes vs. inputs Feb 12, 2021

Show notes

Short Byte: Johnny Ray Austin - Measuring outcomes vs. inputs

How can you best measure the effectiveness of your engineering team? Lines of Code written? Number of PR’s? There are absolutely some input metrics that can have some value, but we don’t hire engineers to write code, we hire them to solve business problems. In this discussion Johnny Ray Austin, CTO at Till shares his experiences of managing his org by focusing on the outcomes produced rather than the inputs delivered.

And thanks to our sustaining partners:

CTO Connection is a community where senior engineering leaders can connect with and learn from their peers!

Short Byte: James Smith - Building vs buying software Feb 06, 2021

Show notes

Building vs buying software
Building vs buying is always a fraught decision. Nominally buying a solution provides more capability and a quicker time to market, but then you have the potential of vendor lock in and being constrained by the limitations of the tool that you chose. And in the engineering world, it’s even harder. While Not Invented Here syndrome is becoming less prevalent, you still need to pick between a ground up implementation or leveraging open source, professional open source and commercial offerings. And then to think about how to incorporate low code APIs and no code solutions into your tech mix in a way that reduces build and maintenance costs without limiting the quality of your final solution. Join us to hear how James thinks about this balance - both as a CEO of a company that buys other peoples software and as the founder of a company that sells its own SaaS solution.

And thanks to our sustaining partners:

CTO Connection is a community where senior engineering leaders can connect with and learn from their peers!

Short Byte: Heidi WIlliams - Building a startup within a startup Jan 29, 2021

Show notes

Building a startup within a startup

There are a unique set of constraints when you’re running an engineering team at a “startup within a startup” - from managing the planning cycle before you’ve hit product market fit, to customizing elements of your product and infrastructure designed for a very different audience. Join us to hear how Heidi Williams, Director of Engineering at Grammarly is working on these challenges by building out an enterprise offering for a traditionally consumer focused business.

And thanks to our sustaining partners:

CTO Connection is a community where senior engineering leaders can connect with and learn from their peers!

Short Byte: Juan Pablo Buriticá 12/17/2020 - learning the craft of engineering management Dec 17, 2020

Show notes

JP learned engineering management the hard way - and he’s passionate about helping new engineering leaders to have a better pathway to building their skills. In this Short Byte we look at the differences between being an engineering leader at a startup vs a larger company, how JP learned to become a manager, resources that are now available for engineering leaders and some hints and tips on managing your boss and hiring effectively at a startup.

And thanks to our sustaining partner - CodeClimate! Engineering leaders who are motivated to exceed 2021 goals know that gut-feel isn't enough to make performance-improving decisions. CTOs, VPEs and Directors at organizations like Slack, Gusto, Pizza Hut trust objective data from Code Climate Velocity to measure and improve productivity, efficiency and performance. Reach out to Code Climate by the end of the year and get a month free when you mention CTO Connection.

CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!

Short Byte: Cat Miller 12/3/20 Dec 03, 2020

Show notes

Culture work is part of a developers job

At Flatiron Health, the team thinks that getting IC’s to invest in the team culture is so important that they’ve built it into their career ladder. So I’ll be asking Cat why “culture work” (from onboarding and mentoring to planning hackathons and running socials) is everyone’s job and how it has helped her to build a cohesive and inclusive culture despite explosive growth of her engineering org.

Using ML/AI to Analyze Your Log Files with Christian Beedgen Dec 02, 2020

Show notes

According to Christian Beedgen CTO and co-founder of Sumo Logic, there is no magic bullet when it comes to innovation. His brain child, Sumo Logic, was founded to empower digital business through real-time analytics delivered as a service.

On this week’s episode of CTO Connection, Christian and Peter chat about the future of log files and where machine learning fits in. Christian also discusses his long road toward becoming a founder and CTO. Take a listen to the episode.

(01:11) - Falling forward
(06:58) - Technical management & leadership
(08:31) - Leading through influence
(16:02) - Getting insights from logs
(24:00) - ML/AI analysis
(32:34) - Magic bullets

Podcast episode production by Dante32.

Using Data Science to Deliver Tangible Business Outcomes with Ian Wong Oct 08, 2020

Show notes

Companies have largely figured out software. Data science, however, seems to be the new frontier. Many data scientists are coming from largely academic backgrounds and maybe don’t understand how to function at jobs in the private sector. Today’s guest is Ian Wong, co-founder and CTO of Opendoor. He chatted with Peter about the questions data scientists can ask themselves to better align their work with tangible business outcomes.

Ian also discussed how the pandemic has led his team to talk about making remote-first work as a permanent practice. Tune in for his insights.

(01:10) - Studying at Stanford
(03:40) - Square and Prismatic
(04:48) - Clojure and Lisp-based languages
(08:41) - Co-founding Opendoor
(14;26) - Recruiting winners
(20:01) - Remote-first reality
(28:36) - The strategy of data science
(35:20) - Hiring data science practitioners
(39:27) - Managing stakeholder expectations
(41:41) - Questions to elicit competence

Podcast episode production by Dante32.

API-First Companies with Paolo Negri Oct 01, 2020

Show notes

Content should be both structure driven, and easily integrate with software. But most Content Management Systems are legacy systems that are not intuitive and clunky. Paolo Negri, co-founder and CTO of Contentful, was an early adopter of GraphQL.

This week on CTO Connection, Paolo talked to Peter about why GraphQL works so well for content and why organizations should strive to be API-driven. Tune in for his thoughts on management.

(01:12) - Paolo's journey to building an org
(04:42) - Life with 20 direct reports
(07:49) - Attracting talent
(11:13) - High Output Management
(11:27) - Managing Humans
(11:59) - The Manager's Path
(12:11) - Team Topologies
(12:34) - Building an API-driven company
(18:16) - Looking into GraphQL
(21:38) - Bridging the gap
(26:22) - Query language
(32:44) - Tooling maturity

Podcast episode production by Dante32.

Globally Distributed Teams vs. Remote Teams with Gustavo Niemeyer Sep 24, 2020

Show notes

Thanks to the pandemic, many people are getting their first taste of working remotely. But for Gustavo Niemeyer of Canonical, having a globally distributed team is just a way of life. On this week’s episode of CTO Connection, he discusses the pros, cons, and considerations for companies considering globally distributed teams.

Further, Gustavo talks to Peter about managing teams looking to solve big, open-ended problems, why finding motivated employees is key, and why he is a proponent of globally distributed teams. Take a listen for more.

(01:12) - Discovering a passion
(05:07) - Team leadership at Conectiva
(06:18) - Doorway to Canonical
(09:16) - Bootstrapping large projects
(17:16) - Managing expectations
(22:03) - Self-motivation
(25:20) - Communication overlap
(30:40) - International compensation
(35:15) - Remote interviews