In this episode of CTO Connection, host Peter Bell sits down with Rebecca Parsons, CTO of Thoughtworks , to discuss managing a large, truly global engineering team, the implications for current advancements in architecture and the importance of supporting diversity and inclusion. [00:28] Path to CTO [01:58] Leading a 1200-person engineering team [04:08] Deciding on team size and structure [05:22] Managing geographically distributed teams; hiring locally [07:49] Career development for individual ...
May 11, 2019•32 min•Ep. 54
In this episode of CTO Connection, host Peter Bell sits down with Colin Bodell , Chief Technology Officer of Groupon , to discuss how to balance being open to unexpected opportunities while still delivering on today’s commitments, encouraging idea-sharing from all levels of an engineering organization and what differentiates leaders from managers. [00:27] The need to stay open to unexpected discoveries [02:38] How to remain open to those unplanned opportunities while still delivering promised bu...
Apr 25, 2019•19 min•Ep. 53
In this episode of CTO Connection, host Peter Bell sits down with Nick Caldwell , Chief Product Officer of Looker , to discuss the challenges of scaling leadership in a growing tech organization. Nick shares his experience moving from a 15-year career at Microsoft into the world of Bay area startups, his approach for finding and developing tech leaders, and some of the hard lessons he learned early in his management career. [00:53] Fundamental challenge of scaling leadership in pace with the bus...
Apr 12, 2019•26 min•Ep. 52
Welcome to the CTO Connection Podcast! StartupCTO.io was an amazing podcast, but Kevin and Miles got busy with their many other projects, so they decided to pass it along to myself. I’m an ex-CTO, a Senior Director at WeWork/Flatiron, and the founder of CTO Connection - a series of summits, meetups and an online platform where engineering leaders can connect with and learn from their peers. I’m speaking with senior engineering leaders from fast-growth tech companies on a regular basis anyway for...
Mar 07, 2019•2 min•Ep. 51
Today we are posting an interview for The Changelog that StartupCTO.io host Kevin Owocki recently did. From The Changelog : We’re joined by Kevin Owocki, the founder of Gitcoin. Gitcoin is a platform to monetize or incentivize work in open source software. We talked about how Gitcoin sits at the intersection of sustaining open source and cryptocurrencies, their history and roadmap, their decision to leverage the brand name of Git, bug bounties, funded issues, web3, MetaMask, and the future of Gi...
Feb 01, 2018•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 50
[from the archives] Our guest today is Scott Carleton . Scott has a passion for building communities and empowering self-growth through education. Scott is currently the VP of Technology at Andela , a global engineering organization dedicated to fostering the next generation of elite tech talent across Africa. Previously, Scott co-founded Artsicle as CTO, building a global community of visual artists now featuring over 6000 creators in 100 countries. His work on Artsicle’s discovery engine, whic...
Jan 01, 2018•43 min
Clay Collins & Nick Gauthier are founders of Nomics will be “Yahoo Finance for Crypto” and the internet’s home page for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies. Nick Gauthier has been developing for the web for 10 years and loves Ruby, Go, and PostgreSQL. You can find him on Twitter at @ngauthier. Clay Collins is currently CEO/Co-founder of Nomics and Board Chair at Drip/Leadpages. Before co-founding Nomics, Clay founded Leadpages, where he drove growth to over 48K paying customers (an...
Dec 01, 2017•43 min•Ep. 48
This episode is co-hosted by Jacob Ablowitz . We are honored today to be interviewing Quin Hoxie , founder and CTO of Swiftype . This episode covers Quin’s experiences as an engineer at Scrib, and then as Co-Founder and CTO of Swiftype — The leading platform delivering search solutions for businesses. Quin’s Bio Quin Hoxie is the Co-Founder and CTO of Swiftype , the leading search platform for delivering fast, relevant and customizable search results for businesses. After graduating from Univers...
Nov 01, 2017•35 min•Ep. 47
Today, we are honored to have Eric Berry , founder of CodeSponsor.io Code Sponsor is a matchmaking platform for software developers and open source projects. Code Sponsor enables paying sponsors to get their messages across in front of developers. In this very special combo episode, Learn more about the founding story of Code Sponsor and the success they’re seeing in helping Open Source projects become more sustainable. Learn about the founding of Gitcoin , a project that Kevin founded with a si...
Oct 23, 2017•34 min•Ep. 46
We are joined this week by Matt Walters (Blockchain Engineer at Consensys, former Techstars CTO), and Rhys Lindmark (Independent Blockchain Engineer) for a very special Blockchain episode of StartupCTO.io. Join us as we share stories about web3, a hacking story, Blockchain Engineering stories, and to learn about “the human operating system”.
Oct 01, 2017•48 min•Ep. 45
Today's episode is a cross-post from Vincent Horn’s new podcast, Crypto-Mind . With permission, I’ve reposted it from Crypto-Mind podcast . This podcast is about contemplating deeply the societal, spiritual, network implications of the networked Web 3.0 world. This episode is all about networks. Specifically, What’s it mean to be a part of the network? Why are networks important? How do we organize ourselves? How do we identify ourselves? What’s it mean to create value and distribute that value?...
Sep 03, 2017•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 44
Raine Revere is the Lead Architect at Prism — The world’s first trustless portfolio market platform. Join Raine and special guest co-host Kevin Seagraves as we discuss blockchain, ethereum, and the future of Web3.
Sep 01, 2017•39 min•Ep. 43
Miles & Kevin announce some changes to the podcast: Miles will be winding down his involvement in the podcast. The show will be once a month (instead of once a week). We’ll ramp up our ‘Emerging Tech’ series, focused initially on VR, AR, Blockchain, Machine Learning, Internet of Things, and Cryptography. Interested in guest co-hosting? Recommend a speaker, and let’s chat .
Aug 03, 2017•13 min•Ep. 42
[from the archives] Our guest today is Dave Zwieback , the author of Beyond Blame: Learning from Failure and Success and an engineering leader in various organizations in & around New York City. Dave does workshops for organizations looking to build People First cultures. If you’re interested in hosting a highly-rated, practical, hands-on workshop based on the book at your company, please contact workshops@mindweather.com . You’ll learn the theory and, most important, get to practice conduct...
Jul 27, 2017•37 min
So you can build it… but, do you know what to do once it’s built? How to monetize it? How do you make enough money to live off of while your company takes off? In this episode, learn about how to go beyond your raw skills of building anything you want and learn what it takes to create a thriving business. Speakers: – Mike AbiEzzi – Alison Hughes – Dan Moore – Brian Ponterelli
Jul 20, 2017•55 min•Ep. 40
Our Boulder Startup Week episode streak continues. Today, we’ve got Kathy Keating, CTO of Apostrophe on the show. Kathy has helped build several successful technology startups, founded her own technology consulting business, guided product strategy for companies, and implemented more highly complex software applications than she can count. She has a knack for building diverse technology teams, successful agile business practices, and mentoring the leaders of tomorrow. Previously Kathy was VP of ...
Jul 13, 2017•15 min•Ep. 39
Our Boulder Startup Week episode streak continues. Today, we’ve got Ed Johnson, CTO of Goally on the show. Ed and his co-founders at Goally are on a mission to help parents build their children’s independence and self-confidence while giving those parents a break from emotionally-draining and endless reminders. All while freeing kids from always feeling “bossed around”. They aim to meaningfully reduce anxiety and stress in millions of family homes, with an early focus on children with autism, AD...
Jul 06, 2017•17 min•Ep. 38
Our Boulder Startup Week episode streak continues. Today, we’ve got Nick Cheever, VP of Technology at 10-4 on the show. Nick has over 15 years of experience in product development, particularly in a technical leadership role. He has been the lead for multiple SaaS-based platforms and has a proven track record of executing intuitive and technically-savvy solutions. Currently, Nick oversees the devops, product, creative, and development groups at 10-4 systems as they disrupt the transportation ind...
Jun 29, 2017•18 min•Ep. 37
Hi and welcome to a very special Boulder Startup Week episode. This week we’ve got some stories from a session entitled “Dev War Stories”. If you’re a longtime listener, you know that this is one of our favorite questions to ask interviewees. There are 3 speakers giving war stories in this episode. The first is Ed Johnson, CTO of Goally The second is Jason Cole, CTO of a few startups around town. The third is Greg Lems, CTO at Door to Door Organics. One last thing. If you hear a flashlight turni...
Jun 22, 2017•23 min•Ep. 36
This week’s guest is Andy Pai, VP Engineering at FullContact. FullContact is the most powerful, fully-connected contact management platform for professionals and enterprises who need to master their contacts and be awesome with people. As VP of Engineering, Andy is focused on growing the engineering organization, and building a secure, private and scalable data platform. Previously, Andy has helped build several data-oriented startups as CTO. He’s passionate about scaling platforms, driving orga...
Jun 15, 2017•13 min•Ep. 35
Jeff Rose presenting in a very special Boulder Startup Week 2017 talk. Artificial intelligence is undergoing a renaissance, with the number of relevant research papers, startups, applications, and new ideas expanding rapidly. These new capabilities will enable people and result in greater aggregate productivity, analogous to the invention of the steam engine that powered the industrial revolution. At the same time, many laborers, drivers, assembly line workers, and even some more skilled roles i...
Jun 08, 2017•41 min•Ep. 34
Cryptocurrencies have the potential to be TCP/IP of money. What does the future look like if they do to money, what the internet did for information? Learn about Ethereum, one of the top cryptocurrencies of 2017. Piper Merriam, Ethereum developer, presenting at Boulder Startup Week. Video of this talk available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPoaMC1qNFY and embedded below:
Jun 01, 2017•39 min•Ep. 33
EFA Colorado presenting in a very special Boulder Startup Week 2017 talk. What is Cryptography, and why does it matter? What is the history of cryptography, and where is it going in the future? Join this joint presentation of the Future of Tech + Legal tracks at Boulder Startup Week to learn more about the civil rights battles of the 21st century. Video of this talk is posted at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RN0F2CmXPU and embeded below:...
May 25, 2017•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 32
Today's episode is from the archives. Michael Lopp (also known as @rands) is a Silicon Valley-based engineering leader who builds both people and product at companies such as Borland, Netscape, Palantir, Pinterest, and Apple. While he’s not worrying about staying relevant, he writes about pens, bridges, people, poker, and werewolves at the popular weblog, Rands in Repose . He works as the VP of Engineering at Slack in San Francisco where he’s furiously working on helping teams reinvent work. Mic...
May 18, 2017•40 min
Today's episode is from the archives. We ask each of our guests what their engineering values are. What we love about this question is that the answers boil down the brass tacks of leadership into 2-3 minutes of fundamentals. We’ve got a fun little thematic episode this week, with 5 answers to this question “What are your engineering values?” jammed packed into a 15-minute episode. In order of appearance: Nader Akhnoukh– CTO of Kapost Travis Kimmel — CEO of GitPrime Julia Austin — CTO of Digital...
May 11, 2017•16 min
Today's episode is from the archives. Last week, @owocki’s startup released a new product — The battles last week during this release reminded us of some of our favorite engineering war stories. We ask every CTO on our show “What is your favorite engineering war story?”, and this episode we’re going to play 4 of our favorites . These four stories are ordered by scale. We’ll start with “just a guy in the garage with a product” to a war story from a large venture scaled startup. In order of appear...
May 04, 2017•23 min
Our guests this week are Jack Dietrich and Ryan VanMiddlesworth of Fount Studio . Join the partners of Fount as they explain The Pirate Code Of Startups how Pirates were doing workplace democracy before it was cool. Awesome.
Apr 27, 2017•33 min•Ep. 28
Today's episode is from the archives. We are joined this week by Chris McAvoy to talk about growing your people & their careers. Learn why advancing your career is like playing great chess; It’s not about having a great strategy; It’s about playing positional chess so that you have all of your pieces in place so when an opportunity presents itself you can take advantage of it. Chris is a technology leader with a passion for open source communities, innovative products, software, and architec...
Apr 20, 2017•46 min
Today's episode is from the archives. Dan Kador is the co-founder & CTO of Keen.io . He’s responsible for building the technology and team responsible for analytics via APIs (among a million other things) at Keen — a leader in the analytics space. Join us to learn about the growth of Keen.io at 3, 10, 30, and (soon) 100 team members; and Dan & his co-founders' journey to building a different type of organization — with a team that’s got the autonomy, purpose, and tools they need to deliv...
Apr 13, 2017•51 min
Our guest today is Scott Carleton . Scott has a passion for building communities and empowering self-growth through education. Scott is currently the VP of Technology at Andela , a global engineering organization dedicated to fostering the next generation of elite tech talent across Africa. Previously, Scott co-founded Artsicle as CTO, building a global community of visual artists now featuring over 6000 creators in 100 countries. His work on Artsicle’s discovery engine, which was able to create...
Apr 06, 2017•43 min•Ep. 25
