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.
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Max Deichmann built Langfuse — the open-source LLM engineering platform acquired by ClickHouse — and explains why the engineer of the future isn't writing code, they're reviewing what agents did overnight. Max Deichmann didn't set out to build the observability layer for the AI era. He started with mobile apps, taught himself to code via Harvard's CS50, and ended up in Y Combinator with a SaaS product he wasn't excited about. Then ChatGPT launched, and on a Sunday night at 10 pm, his co-founder ...
How a browser-based fix for an enterprise auth problem became a W3C web standard and what it means for how AI agents will interact with the web. Alex Nahas, founder of MCP-B and initiator of the WebMCP web standard, joins Tobias to explore one of the most underappreciated shifts happening in AI: the browser as the primary runtime for agentic systems. Key topics covered: What MCP actually is: an RPC framework for calling tools across processes, not the complex protocol it's made out to be The OAu...
Thirty years building search infrastructure — and why the AI industry quietly depends on it. SHOW NOTES Jean-Paul Schmetz has been close to search infrastructure for nearly three decades — as founder of Clix, the European search engine that eventually became part of Brave, and now as Chief of Ads at Brave Software. In this conversation with Tobi, he opens up the hood on one of the internet's most misunderstood infrastructure layers. Key topics covered: The three independent search indices: why o...
Fitness functions, agentic guardrails, and why experienced architects matter more than ever in the AI era Show Notes: Neal Ford has spent decades thinking about how software systems hold together over time. In this episode, Tobias sits down with Neal to ask the question nobody is asking loudly enough: when AI agents write the code, who is responsible for the architecture? We dive into: -** Neal's origin story: **from journalism to mechanical engineering to computer science, and why writing made ...
Modernizing Yahoo in the private-equity era: legacy constraints, shipping velocity, and AI-native consumer products Yahoo is far more than a nostalgia brand—it’s a broad consumer platform operating at huge scale. In this episode, Tobias sits down with Lee Zen (CTO @ Yahoo) to explore how the company is modernizing in the private-equity era, and what “innovation” looks like when you’re also responsible for decades of legacy systems. We dive into: ** Yahoo’s consumer portfolio: Mail, Finance, Spor...
Solving the "Outer Loop" bottleneck: Agentic coding, Stacked PRs, and the future of the CTO role with Graphite's Greg Foster The "Inner Loop" of coding (typing syntax) has been solved by AI. The new bottleneck is the "Outer Loop"—reviewing, testing, and merging the flood of code that agents generate. In this episode, Greg Foster (CTO of Graphite, now part of Cursor) explains why this shift drove their merger and what it means for the future of engineering. We dive into: The Outer Loop Crisis: Wh...
From “dangerously skip permissions” to the Andon cord: voluntary adoption, flow metrics, and how agents change what CTOs optimize for Partner Tradegate Direct: Europe’s most direct online broker – trade for free, efficiently, and directly on the stock exchange. Trade directly here TOPdesk: Discover the future of internal IT in the DACH region with the "Inside ITSM 2026" report – featuring exclusive data on AI, DEX, and collaboration from 6,000 IT professionals. Download the report here In this e...
From acquisition carve-outs to 100ms interaction rules: Engineering velocity through team clarity, not tool proliferation Partner TOPdesk: Discover the future of internal IT in the DACH region with the "Inside ITSM 2026" report – featuring exclusive data on AI, DEX, and collaboration from 6,000 IT professionals. Download the report here Outline How do you maintain execution velocity while building quality products? Loïc Houssier (CTO of Superhuman Mail, formerly Superhuman) offers a contrarian p...
From Alexa to LLMs: Platform experiments, distribution challenges, and how AI is democratizing feature development in travel tech Tradegate Direct: Europe's most direct online broker – trade for free, efficiently, and directly on the stock exchange. Trade directly here In this episode, Matthias Keller (CPO @ Kayak) shares strategic lessons about making AI product decisions under uncertainty. With 12 years at Kayak and experience spanning multiple AI waves—from Alexa to LLMs—Matthias offers a mas...
How single-node performance and embedded analytics are revolutionizing database architecture for modern applications Tradegate Direct: Europe's most direct online broker – trade for free, efficiently, and directly on the stock exchange. Trade directly here In this episode, we dive deep into the world of analytical databases with Mark Raasveldt, the co-founder and CTO of DuckDB Labs. Mark takes us through his fascinating journey from academic research to building one of the most talked-about data...
What Wiz's $32B acquisition teaches about scaling CTO teams, rapid innovation, and customer-centric leadership Tradegate Direct: Europe's most direct online broker – trade for free, efficiently, and directly on the stock exchange. Trade directly here What does it take to build a company worth Google's $32 billion acquisition? Solal shares the hard-won lessons from scaling technical teams during one of the fastest-growing security companies in history. Key leadership insights from the episode: • ...
From assembly lines to problem-solving teams: practical strategies for breaking development silos Here's the thing about agile transformations: they almost never work the way they're supposed to. Teams end up more siloed than before, chasing tickets instead of solving actual problems. Klaus Breyer has seen this pattern everywhere, and he's figured out some ways to break it. Klaus runs product and technology at Edding—yeah, the pen company—but his background is anything but traditional. He learne...
In this episode, Kelsey Hightower, a legendary figure in tech, offers profound insights from his 25-year career, covering the persistent challenges of infrastructure complexity and the strategic advantages of leveraging managed services. He underscores the critical need for engineers and CTOs to align their work with business revenue and adapt to evolving tech landscapes rather than making permanent decisions. Hightower also shares his compelling philosophy behind retiring at 42, focusing on 'learning how to live' and making a conscious shift from the continuous grind to a life of purpose and personal growth.
Navigating AI hype versus implementation reality in large engineering organizations The AI transformation challenge isn't just technical—it's organizational. Peter Gostev, Head of AI at Moonpig, discusses building practical AI capabilities in a 600-person company while navigating the gap between AI hype and implementation reality. From managing adoption across 150 software engineers to partnering with non-technical teams, Peter shares insights on driving meaningful AI transformation that goes be...
Unfiltered insights on microservices myths, cloud cost reality, and pragmatic technical leadership Two veteran CTOs tear down today's tech hype with brutal honesty and hard-won experience. Raz Schweiger-Shuty shares his controversial approach to technical leadership at auxmoney, where he stopped a microservices rewrite and focused on business outcomes over engineering trends. From his early days as a QA engineer to running 80-person engineering organizations, Raz demonstrates why sometimes the b...
Building Human-Level AI for Code: Model Factories, RL at Scale, and Distributed Teams Technical Deep Dives: Poolside’s model factory: end-to-end automation from raw data to production models Scaling RL from code execution: 800,000+ containerized repos, millions of agent tasks Immutable versioning with Apache Iceberg for full traceability Distributed team structure: 120+ engineers across US/EU, monthly in-person sprints Hardware orchestration: 10,000+ H200s, hot swap failover, dynamic allocation ...
Bridging operational technology and cloud architecture for industrial-scale systems The convergence of AI and IoT is reshaping how technical leaders approach industrial systems architecture. Bernd Groß, CEO and co-founder of Cumulocity, shares insights from building Germany's leading IoT platform—from its origins as a Nokia spin-off to becoming a critical infrastructure for companies managing tens of thousands of connected industrial assets. This conversation explores the unique engineering chal...
Real-time system architecture lessons from the edge of the energy transition Technical infrastructure enables the modern energy transition. Barbara Wittenberg, CTO at 1KOMMA5°, reveals the engineering challenges behind connecting and optimizing 40,000+ household energy assets while building a unified tech platform after acquiring 80+ companies across 7 countries. Tech leaders will find valuable parallels to their own challenges as Barbara discusses how her team modernized legacy systems, managed...
In this episode, Adam Schuck from Canva discusses the company's hypergrowth, engineering team scaling, and approach to AI. He shares insights into Canva's technology decisions, including real-time concurrent editing and the unified web-based mobile experience. Adam also covers maintaining a startup culture at scale and personal productivity hacks for leaders.
Debunking AI hype, exploring security risks, and strategies for CTOs in the age of rapid change. In this episode, Tobi talks with Georg Zoeller, Co-Founder of the Centre for AI Leadership and mercenaries.ai, about the turbulent landscape of AI. Georg, with his background at Meta and deep expertise in AI strategy, cuts through the hype surrounding AI's capabilities and economic impact. They discuss the 'singularity' we're already in, driven by rapid, open-source AI development, and why this makes...
Leading in ambiguous environments and the impact of AI on engineering practices In this episode, Tobi talks with Ivan Kusalic, CTO of Enpal, who leads a team of 250 engineers at one of Germany's leading solar energy companies. Ivan shares insights from his extensive technical leadership journey and his recent return to coding after seven years due to his excitement about AI. Ivan discusses how he navigates complexity and ambiguity in the renewable energy sector, where Enpal builds systems to hel...
Ship Great Software Through Simplicity and Discipline Discover insights into building a high-performance engineering organization with Stefan Richter, founder of freiheit.com technologies. With 25+ years of experience delivering successful software projects for the Who’s Who of European businesses and industries, Stefan shares his philosophy of radical engineering culture and maintaining an exceptionally high bar in recruiting. This episode dives deep into how freiheit.com has achieved their "Ne...
Tobi and Dat discuss AI's impact on technical leadership, tools, deep learning, and Europe's innovation scene, including practical use cases for AI agents. AI is moving faster than ever, and staying ahead of the curve is a challenge for every tech leader. In this episode, Dat Tran joins Tobi to break down what’s happening in the AI space, from cutting-edge model releases to AI-powered productivity tools and the global race for AI dominance. Dat has spent years leading AI teams at Idealo and Axel...
Platform Teams and DevOps Optimization: Insights from Camille Fournier on platform engineering, career growth, and CTO strategies for success. How do you create an effective platform team and optimize DevOps? Tobi interviews Camille Fournier about her career, technical insights, and best practices in platform engineering. Camille shares her journey from building her own computers and installing Linux in high school to becoming Managing Director at JPMorgan Chase and authoring influential books f...
Scaling Tech in Regulated Industries: Engineering Growth with Security, Compliance, and Culture Ever wondered how regulated companies like stock exchanges handle tech growth? Dennis Winter (CTO @ Börse Stuttgart) shares how to build engineering organizations in regulated environments. With experience from embedded systems to leading tech at SolarisBank and Börse Stuttgart, he dives deep into scaling teams while maintaining security and compliance standards 🏦 🏗️ Early-stage tech decisions and b...
The Tech and Business Side of Building an SDK Get insight into the SDK business (and learn about cross-platform performance and developer marketing) with Dr. Daniel Hauschildt (MD & CPTO at IMG.LY). As a client-side offering (no servers!), IMG.LY needs to take extra steps to ensure reliability on all devices 📱, platforms 💻 and browsers 🌐. From crafting developer-friendly documentation to optimizing performance on every device and platform imaginable, Daniel shares hard-earned insights fro...
Planning AND Practice: The Secret to Incident Response Plan and PRACTICE for better incident response with insights from Tim Armandpour, CTO of PagerDuty. Learn the secrets to resilience from the team that mitigated the impact of a major outage—handling a 250% traffic surge while delivering on their SLA. Listen to find out: 🛠️ Why planning AND practice are both critical for incident response. 🚧 How to practice for incident response (e.g Failure Fridays with Chaos Engineering) 🧑🤝🧑 Ownershi...
Cross-Functional Team Members: What, Why, How Find out about cross-functional team members with Daniel Bartholomae, CTO at optilyz (direct mail SaaS). At optilyz, team members wear multiple hats—whatever hats they need to own the product lifecycle. From product management and design to development and customer engagement, this model eliminates silos and drives efficiency. Daniel breaks down how this innovative approach works, the tools and processes that make it possible, and why it’s a perfect ...
Output → Outcome → Impact | Product + Tech | Adjacent Possibilities How do we actually organize people to consistently deliver value and enjoy the process? This, Eric Bowman (CTO @ King) says, is the core challenge facing any CTO. In this thought-provoking episode, Eric shares insights from his remarkable career in gaming (The Sims, King), e-commerce (Zalando), and navigation technology (TomTom), offering a unique perspective on building high-performing teams and effective tech organizations. Li...
Aligning engineering with business outcomes, developer productivity and developer experience Become a more effective team in this CTO podcast featuring Rebecca Murphey, Field CTO of Swarmia and co-author of Build. From her years of experience working in the developer productivity organizations at Stripe and Indeed and now at Swarmia, Rebecca knows this conversation isn’t just about developer metrics and productivity - it’s about the broader picture 🖼️. How do we align🧭 our engineering work wit...
