Leonard is the founder and CEO of Hello Chava, a company reimagining productivity tools for the solo professional. Over the past 25 years, Leonard has recognized emerging markets and launched multiple successful products with a particular focus in SaaS, Cloud Computing, and Collaboration through first gen products such as Hello Chava, Syncplicity, Windows PowerShell, and SETI@home. On today's episode we discuss scaling your leadership, being humble, racing cars and slowing down to go faster. Con...
Jun 11, 2018•47 min•Ep 45•Transcript available on Metacast Given a jar of peanut butter, a spoon and a challenging problem, I feel set up for success! I build and manage happy, healthy engineering teams that ship impactful products without sacrificing the user or developer experience. I like to focus on engineering culture (testing, performance + career growth), creating tools for engineering managers, internationalization, accessibility and improving the relationship between engineering, design, product managers and product support. I'm in a happy plac...
May 13, 2018•45 min•Ep 44•Transcript available on Metacast Today's podcast is a recording of a live panel that I moderated which focused on nurturing an inclusive environment at technology companies. It was part of a larger event put on by the tech mentoring company Plato. The fantastic guests that I had a chance to discuss this with were: Shivani Sharma, Senior Engineering Manager at Slack Nick Caldwell, VP Engineering at Reddit Nidhi Gupta, SVP Engineering at Hired I have interviewed both Shivani Sharma and Nick Caldwell on previous podcast episodes a...
May 06, 2018•40 min•Ep 43•Transcript available on Metacast Erica is an engineering manager for the integrations and data analytics teams at SalesLoft – where she’s helping grow the product engineering team for the 4th fastest growing software company in North America and #1 best place to work in Atlanta. During her 18 year career in tech, she’s worked with large companies, including Boeing, FOX Interactive Media and Turner Broadcasting, as well as early-stage startups--of which 2 were acquired, by MySpace and Oracle. Erica works passionately towards div...
Apr 29, 2018•48 min•Ep 42•Transcript available on Metacast Dennis is the Head of Integration at HiredScore, a startup that helps large companies achieve their hiring and recruiting goals using deep system integrations and AI. Dennis is a former team and group leader at Sears Israel working on large scale social e-commerce platform and before that he was a team leader and a full stack developer at the Israeli Air Force. He is passionate about people growth and company culture. On today's episode we discuss the challenges, both logistical and emotional, w...
Apr 23, 2018•54 min•Ep 41•Transcript available on Metacast Katie is a Director of Engineering at Buffer, a globally distributed team with no offices, and O’Reilly author. At Buffer, she leads the engineering team focusing on crafting productive, effective teams and delivering a world class software product. She previously worked as software engineer before moving into leadership. Her writing has appeared in The Next Web, Inc Magazine and Fast Company. Contact Info: website: http:// katiewomersley.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/ katie_womers Medium: >...
Apr 16, 2018•46 min•Ep 40•Transcript available on Metacast Rachael is an engineering manager for the infrastructure and backend teams at Lever, a collaborative hiring software product helping companies recruit and grow their teams. She joined the team in 2014 as a product engineer and was one of the first employees to kickoff internal discussions around diversity and inclusion. She transitioned into a management role over a year ago and is dedicated to growing engineering teams who have a strong combination of technical and soft skills. On today's episo...
Apr 08, 2018•48 min•Ep 39•Transcript available on Metacast Four Engineering Managers from Facebook, Kabam, Clever, and Medium shared their tips on becoming a great Engineering Leader during the Plato event hosted on May 15, 2017 in San Francisco . Moderator : Christian McCarrick , CTO/VP of engineering at Telmate Jean Hsu , Engineering Management Consultant, former Engineering Manager at Medium Nikhil Pandit , Engineering Manager at Clever Inc. Richard Sun , Senior Director of Engineering at Kabam Yi Huang , Senior Engineering Manager at Facebook This e...
Mar 26, 2018•30 min•Ep 38•Transcript available on Metacast Jean-Denis Greze is Head of Engineering at Plaid, the technology company giving developers access to the financial system and the tools to build many of the most influential applications and services of the modern financial era. Companies such as Venmo + Paypal, Coinbase, Robinhood, Acorns, Betterment, Clarity Money and hundreds more are built on Plaid - whose investors consist of Goldman Sachs, NEA, Citi Ventures, Spark Capital, American Express, and Google Ventures. Prior to joining Plaid, Jea...
Mar 19, 2018•59 min•Ep 37•Transcript available on Metacast Ian Miell is a software industry veteran who has written, maintained, managed and architected some of the world's busiest systems. He works in financial services now, and also speaks, writes, teaches, and consults on various subjects, the common theme being how change can be managed within complex organisations and the raw technology that can enable that. On today' s show Ian discusses the steps he took to change a team's culture that he inherited. Contact Information: https://zwischenzugs.com/ ...
Mar 12, 2018•54 min•Ep 36•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode we discuss having hard conversations, overcoming fear to grow as a technology leader and humanizing the interviewing process. Emily Leathers helps leaders, teams, and communities achieve big goals that make a difference. She’s lucky enough to hold two dream jobs at the same time: as a Director of Engineering at a small startup called Brigade, where she builds web and native apps to help voters make our elected representatives actually work for us, and as an engineering leadership...
Mar 05, 2018•1 hr•Ep 35•Transcript available on Metacast Matias Woloski is the CTO and co-founder of Auth0, an identity platform that provides authentication, authorization and single-sign-on as a service. Auth0 was founded in 2013 and it has now 300 employees and it’s a fully distributed company. Since 2013, Auth0 has tripled and doubled its revenue every year, counting with more than two thousand customers and tens of millions in recurring revenue. Before Auth0, he co-founded a high-end consulting business that employed 120 consultants. Matias lives...
Feb 26, 2018•53 min•Ep 34•Transcript available on Metacast Edmond Lau is the author of the book, The Effective Engineer — now the de facto onboarding guide for many engineering teams. He's spent the past decade building and leading engineering teams at high-growth companies across Silicon Valley — including at Quip, Quora, Ooyala, and Google. As an engineering leadership coach, Edmond has worked directly with CTO's, directors, managers, and other emerging leaders to unlock what's possible for them and their teams. He's run workshops and seminars at plac...
Feb 19, 2018•46 min•Ep 33•Transcript available on Metacast On today's episode we discuss product & engineering team alignment, deadlines and urgency and ideas for helping under representated groups becoming technology leaders. Kimber Lockhart is Chief Technology Officer at One Medical Group – a rapidly growing model of primary care that integrates innovative design with leading technology to deliver higher quality service while lowering the total cost of care. Previously, Kimber co-founded Increo, a web-based service that allows users to share and revie...
Feb 11, 2018•51 min•Ep 32•Transcript available on Metacast Andrew Marsh, CTO and co-founder of Interviewing.io talks about the poor state of interviewing process in today's tech companies, how to improve them and his company, Interviewing.io Andrew Marsh is co-founder and CTO of Interviewing.io A product designer and software engineer, he previously founded Fifth Column Games and has shipped titles with over 100 million users. Andrew ultimately left games in search of an industry where making a positive impact on the community was more aligned with succ...
Feb 05, 2018•43 min•Ep 31•Transcript available on Metacast On today's show Lawrence and I discuss why group meetings can be such time wasters, the importance of one-one-ones and lawrence's book. Over the last 18 years, Lawrence Krubner has been the technical co-founder of 3 different startups that he has led to success. He has also seen millions of dollars wasted on poorly run projects that he have had to turn around and save. Turning around a failing project can go smoothly, so long as everyone on the team can be completely honest about why a project w...
Jan 28, 2018•43 min•Ep 30•Transcript available on Metacast Juan Pablo Buritica, VP of Engineering at splice.com, talks about building and managing a distributed team and the benefits of running developer communities. Juan Pablo Buritica is the VP of Engineering at splice.com where he leads a distributed engineering team throughout the US and Latin America that is building the creative hub for the modern musician. Juan Pablo has built effective software engineering organizations by emphasizing Open Source software values, technical excellence, trust, and...
Jan 22, 2018•54 min•Ep 29•Transcript available on Metacast Ben Jackson, formally of VICE Media and The NYT, talks about the importance of employee onboarding and his new company For the Win. Ben Jackson has been designing and building consumer-facing products for 20 years. Before founding For the Win, Ben worked as Director of Mobile at VICE Media and iOS Lead at The New York Times. He’s written about design, technology, and psychology for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and WIRED, among others. Ben studied Computer Science and Fine Arts at the University...
Jan 15, 2018•41 min•Ep 28•Transcript available on Metacast Robert Slifka, VP of Engineering at Sharethrough, talks about Calibrate, the conference for software engineering managers he organizes, the importance of finding good fit for both employees and companies and having a more fulfilling work experience.
Jan 08, 2018•53 min•Ep 27•Transcript available on Metacast Arquay Harris, Director of Engineering at Slack, and I discuss the importance of self advocacy and taking ownership of your career path.
Dec 18, 2017•44 min•Ep 26•Transcript available on Metacast Oren Ellenbogen and I discuss leadership principals, his book "Leading Snowflakes" and "The Software Lead Weekly", his weekly email reading list for engineering leaders. Oren is currently the VP of Engineering at Forter.
Dec 11, 2017•54 min•Ep 25•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Tido Carriero and Emily Zahuta discuss the importance of a well planned and executed interviewing process and how important it is to scaling a successful software engineering organization. Tido Carriero: Tido has been the VP of Engineering at Segment for the past two years, where he's spent much of his time growing the engineering team from ~10 to ~55. Prior to Segment, he was an early member of the Dropbox engineering team. At Dropbox, he started the Dropbox for Business produc...
Dec 04, 2017•53 min•Ep 24•Transcript available on Metacast bethanye McKinney Blount and I discuss how to be a better manager, how to make your employees more bad-ass and Keanu Reeves... bethanye is the co-founder and CEO of Compass and formally of Linden Lab and Facebook.
Nov 27, 2017•52 min•Ep 23•Transcript available on Metacast Travis Kimmel, the CEO of Gitprime, and I discuss the power of using data to help make better decisions and improve your team’s productivity.
Nov 20, 2017•44 min•Ep 22•Transcript available on Metacast Three great Engineering Leaders (from Datto, Trello, Uber) talk about their worst mistakes as Engineering Managers during the Plato event #1 hosted on May 15, 2017 in San Francisco.
Nov 13, 2017•22 min•Ep 21•Transcript available on Metacast Ana Ulin discusses her path as a manager and the benefits of hiring people from coding bootcamps like Hackbright academy.
Nov 06, 2017•40 min•Ep 20•Transcript available on Metacast Cate Huston, the Mobile Lead at Automattic (makers of Wordpress), and I discuss the challenges of becoming a manager of managers.
Oct 30, 2017•43 min•Ep 19•Transcript available on Metacast Listen to the live panel I moderated at a recent Plato event. The topic was building and engineering culture that retains talent. There are some really great responses to the questions and it was a great panel overall.
Oct 23, 2017•39 min•Ep 18•Transcript available on Metacast Allen Cheung, Director of Engineering at Affirm and formally at Google and Square, discusses how engineering managers should coach their employees.
Oct 16, 2017•45 min•Ep 17•Transcript available on Metacast Charity Majors, co-founder of Honeycomb.io, discusses the engineers who become managers and go back to being engineers and how awesome they are.
Oct 09, 2017•48 min•Ep 16•Transcript available on Metacast 
