Today's episode is from the archives. We are honored to be joined by Tim Jenkins , CoFounder & CTO of SendGrid . SendGrid solves problems for companies sending transactional e-mail. Tim is currently involved with back-end development, operations, and support, and has worn many hats as SendGrid has grown from 3 team members to over 300 over the last 8 years. Join us to hear the founding story of one of the most successful email deliverability providers on the web, take a journey through the e...
Mar 30, 2017•34 min
Our guest this week is Courtland Allen ; MIT graduate, Y Combinator alum, full-stack web developer, and professional designer. He’s spent over 8 years building, designing, and marketing web-based products and companies, and is currently running IndieHackers.com . This episode is for you if you’re into bootstrapped businesses, side projects, and community. Favorite Quotes I’ve been doing startups ever since graduating from school. The idea behind Indie Hackers is that it’s completely transparent....
Mar 23, 2017•41 min•Ep. 23
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 conducting Learning Reviews...
Mar 16, 2017•37 min•Ep. 22
Our guest today is Zack Bomsta , CTO of Owlet, which produces the Owlet Baby Monitor. In addition to growing the team, he is involved in electronic hardware design and miniaturization, manufacturing, firmware, and embedded systems development. Join us to hear war stories from the founding story of Owlet. Owlet is hiring engineering leaders in UT.
Mar 09, 2017•37 min•Ep. 21
Our episode today is from the archives. Julia Austin is the CTO of DigitalOcean and a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School of Entrepreneurial Management. Hear about her experiences scaling at rocket ship speed leading DigitalOcean’s engineering and product teams. Find Julia on Twitter at @austinfish and find DigitalOcean at DigitalOcean.com
Mar 02, 2017•44 min
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. Michael has written two books. His first ...
Feb 23, 2017•40 min•Ep. 19
Anant Jhingran has been in the tech industry for 27 years and has a Ph.D. in Database Systems from Berkeley. He’s been at IBM, CTO of Apigee, and then after Apigee was acquired, at Google. Apigee manages an API & data layer for various large enterprises. They look at the data exhaust of those systems and understand patterns so people can improve what they’re doing through the APIs. Apigee was recently acquired by Google, and Anant is working on integrating its technologies into Google’s infr...
Feb 16, 2017•40 min•Ep. 18
Our guest this week is Ian Bernstein , CTO of Sphero . Sphero is creating a new category of toys called “Connected Toys” that take the best of what kids and adults love about their smart devices and fuse it with our robots that exist in the real world. Ian’s passion is in electronics and robotics. Ever since he was 12 years old he has been building robots. Learn about how he parlayed his love of robotics into one of the most successful robotics company in the country. Sphero is a robotic ball th...
Feb 09, 2017•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 17
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 deliver great analytics software....
Feb 02, 2017•51 min•Ep. 16
Today we are honored to be joined by Tim Jenkins , CoFounder & CTO of SendGrid . SendGrid solves problems for companies sending transactional e-mail. Tim is currently involved with back-end development, operations, and support, and has worn many hats as SendGrid has grown from 3 team members to over 300 over the last 8 years. Join us to hear the founding story of one of the most successful email deliverability providers on the web, take a journey through the ebb & flow of a CTO’s respons...
Jan 26, 2017•34 min•Ep. 15
(BONUS EPISODE FROM THE ARCHIVES) Learn about how Patrick McKenzie combined his technical skills with marketing/sales skills to launch & grow several successful internet businesses. Patrick is the creator of Bingo Card Creator. He learned marketing and sales to launch and grow Kalzumeus Software; He has worked with 37signals, Fog Creek Software, and is now in content & community at Stripe. Find Patrick on Twitter at @patio11 and listen to Patrick’s podcast here . Don’t miss out on future...
Jan 19, 2017•46 min
We’re joined this week by guest co-host Diana Pfeil to interview Kathy Keating — Kathy is a Colorado-based Startup CTO who has helped build several successful technology startups, founded her own technology consulting business, guided product strategy for companies and implemented many complex software applications. Join us for the first episode of StartupCTO.io in 2017 to discuss Kathy’s approach to building a startup from the ground up, data & analytics, being involved in the community, me...
Jan 12, 2017•43 min•Ep. 13
This week’s episode is from the archives. It’s an interview with Jud Valeski. Jud was a co-founder of Gnip (acquired by Twitter), a real-time data portability software initiative. From client-side consumer-facing products to large scale back-end infrastructure projects, he has enjoyed working with technology for over twenty years. He’s been a part of engineering, product, and M&A teams at IBM, Netscape, onebox.com, and AOL. He has played a central role in the release of a wide range of produ...
Jan 05, 2017•44 min
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 Ocean Manuel Mattke — Chief Innovatio...
Dec 29, 2016•16 min•Ep. 11
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 architecture. He is presently a mentor at Tech...
Dec 22, 2016•46 min•Ep. 10
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 appearance: Patrick McKenzie – independent s...
Dec 15, 2016•23 min•Ep. 9
Gevorg was the Co-Founder/CTO of LionSharp, where he led the development of Gesture and Voice controlled systems. After he left Lionsharp, he became an Agile product/project manager. Join Gevorg as we chat about collaborative leadership, agile teams and organizations, customer engagement, and delivering business and customer value at breakneck speed.
Dec 08, 2016•41 min•Ep. 8
Manuel Mattke is an innovator, entrepreneur, tech product guy (and from time to time developer), with a background in finance, technology, and innovation consulting. This week is an extra special episode. Manuel was Kevin’s CTO mentor at the last startup he founded, and Kevin is super excited to share some of the insights that Manuel shared with him, with all of you. When he’s not mentoring up & coming CTO’s, Manuel is building his own startups. He has founded and built several startups, inc...
Dec 01, 2016•41 min•Ep. 7
We’re taking this week off; If you’re in the US, you’re celebrating Thanksgiving. If you’re not in the US, you can still give thanks — Listen to one of our favorite episodes from the archives: Quantifying Engineering w. Travis Kimmel of Gitprime. Travis Kimmel is the CEO of GitPrime . GitPrime analyzes a team’s codebase to quantify engineering progress. They make it easy to identify engineers who are stuck or bogged down with refactoring and quantify the amount of effort spent paying down techni...
Nov 24, 2016•30 min
Julia Austin is the CTO of DigitalOcean and a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School of Entrepreneurial Management. Hear about her experiences scaling at rocket ship speed leading DigitalOcean’s engineering and product teams. Find Julia on Twitter at @austinfish and find DigitalOcean at DigitalOcean.com
Nov 17, 2016•44 min•Ep. 5
Andrew Useckas is the CTO of Threat-X; a 10 person startup based out of Colorado that provides Web Application Firewalls as a Service. Join Andrew as we discuss the most relevant threats to software startup companies today and we learn how he and his team built a next-gen security company. Find Andrew on Twitter at https://twitter.com/daronin and Threat-X at https://threat-x.com/ Favorite Quotes: An engineer has to be a self starter. I look for someone who can really take initiative; someone who...
Nov 10, 2016•36 min•Ep. 4
Ingrid Alongi is the co-founder of Quickleft, a software development firm in Boulder Colorado which was acquired by Cognizant in March of 2016. In this episode, Ingrid takes us through the founding story of QuickLeft, and how QuickLeft used Net Promoter Scores to drive great outcomes for end-customers. Find Ingrid on Twitter at @electromute and check out QuickLeft at QuickLeft.com . Favorite Quotes: My biggest engineering value is pragmatism and collaboration. Things get done better when you wor...
Nov 03, 2016•42 min•Ep. 3
We’ve got a special bonus episode for you all this week. Episode 0.8 of our Podcast was a Boulder Startup Week talk about ZCash by its founder; Zooko Wilcox. ZCash is a privacy-centric blockchain. Zcash payments are published on a public blockchain, but the sender, recipient, and amount of a transaction remain private. A lot of people are really excited about a blockchain that enables truly anonymous transactions on the web and believes that ZCash could be a top 5 blockchain within a year. ZCash...
Oct 28, 2016•17 min
Brandon Purcell is the CTO of SpatialKey ; a leading geospatial intelligence analytics platform. SpatialKey started as a proof of concept prototype in 2007 and has grown into a full-fledged profitable business over the last seven years. Listen to this episode to hear SpatialKey’s founding journey; from finding a core customer who was willing to pay for their product, to growing into a SAAS provider serving several prominent paying customers....
Oct 27, 2016•45 min•Ep. 1
