StartupCTO.io

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 Gitcoin and how open source benefits.

[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, which was able to create a personalized experience for passive users, earned NYER’s “Best Use of Technology” award in 2013.  This episode is for you if you’re into #learning #hiring or #mentorship. Favorite Quotes You hear a lot that “its all about the people”, but you don’t really get it until it kicks you in the shins. I think a lot about communication through a company in the context of dynamic systems and controls. You can have an input of information where someone’s unaligned or there’s some dissonance, and you’re not going to feel the full impact of that until it works it’s way through the organization. In the early days, I felt like I needed the “best” engineers. That came out as needing Stanford Grads. But what I realized very quickly was that they had very different expectations and needs. I couldnt provide for them the right kinds of challenges because we were still hunting for product market fit. I’ve found that in hiring I should look for “potential” and not “pedigree”. We created a culture of really customer focused engineers. The engineers really own their parts of the product. They *really* care about it’s usability. Friction rises in communication when information doesnt have a place to settle. Chat is a tool. I’m sold on it. A tool is necessary but not sufficient. You need the tool to be able to create the behaviour you want, but you need a cultural change or a behaviour/belief change to use the tool effectively. Chat allows us an always on meeting in its worst form. At best, it’s an asyncronous tool to keep everyone in sync. On chat, my top belief is “Get everything into public channels” The health of an engineering team is: How many issues are raised and resolved, and how fast is that iteration? Finding out how to have the right focus for a conversation in a chat channel is important. When I first started doing 1:1s, I totally didn’t want to do it. I’d make up excuses. Every 1:1, there were engineers who would complain and I just wanted to avoid that. But it turns out 1:1s are invaluable because you’ll always discover something important that you don’t know. If you’re having problems in your organization, a 1:1 is like taking a knife to that problem and sinking it a little deeper. When I first joined an organization with an existing engineering team, the first 1:1s were very much “clearing out the backlog” — Figuring out the existing problems. I have a passion for developing peoples potential. How do we measure someone’s learning velocity – how quickly they’re picking up new skills? The killer problem with distributed teams right now is whiteboarding. It’s just *so* hard to do remotely. Distributed teams are about trust. How do you get the information you need? How do you communicate outward & upward so that we have trust at all times? We need to know we’re all pushing in the same direciton. Whats really incredible about sotware development is that the people who are building the applications have

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 (and 175 employees), led the company’s acquisition of Drip, and raised $38M in venture capital financing

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 University of Arizona in 2008 with a B.S. in Computer Science, Quin worked on search at AboutUs before joining Scribd in 2010 to work on their search team. His experiences building the search platform at Scribd led him to start Swiftype with fellow Scribd engineer Matt Riley in 2012. Since graduating from Y Combinator in Winter 2012, Swiftype has become the easiest way to add powerful search to any website or application. With clients ranging from TechCrunch to Hubspot to Qualcomm, Swiftype powers billions of searches every month across the web. About Swiftype Founded in 2012, Swiftype’s industry leading search platform delivers relevant and customizable search results for businesses. Swiftype’s suite of products, Site Search and Enterprise Search, have revolutionized the way people find information across their organization and on public facing websites. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company has raised $23 million in funding, by investors including NEA and Y Combinator. Its strong customer portfolio includes AT&T, Shopify, SurveyMonkey, Dr. Pepper, publishers Engadget and TechCrunch, and brands like Qualcomm, Asana, Marketo and Hubspot. About Jacob Ablowitz Jacob Ablowitz serves as Co-Founder and CEO of dmi.io, the marketplace for business data. dmi is transforming business decision-making by democratizing access to data-driven insights through connecting sellers and buyers of data while streamlining data discovery, evaluation and contracting. Jacob has deep experience with the data and technology systems that power the modern information economy. He began his career at Lockheed Martin, working on bleeding-edge ballistic missile defense and submarine sonar systems. At Dealertrack Technologies (now Cox Automotive), Jacob led infrastructure projects underpinning their market-leading car loan application platform. In 2012 he moved on to Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world, in an analytics role, before starting dmi in 2013. Jacob holds a B.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the University of Colorado and a Master’s in Systems & Information Engineering from the University of Virginia. He is an active member of the Colorado startup community.

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 similar goal — pushing open source forward. If you have an OSS project you’re working on, and a few bucks every day in sponsorships might help, CodeSponsor is there to help. Learn more about Codesponsor at CodeSponsor.io and Eric at @coderberry.

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”.

Todays 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? Which network do I want to put value into? How much whats happening to cryptocurrency is _just what’s happening in the world_ reflected back into crypto? The big network is the Life and all life that we know. Making connections there seems really important. Is it ethical to run a bitcoin node in a world where there is climate change. Is POS a moral eventuality? How a simple Google bus is analogy for new world and a lightning rod for some.  Taking the model of the king and democratizing it some. If you are a good entrepreneur you are king. You have followers .  Take that model and took it apart so everyone can be king in their own way. Rise of mindfulness when attention becomes a constraint. Subscribe to the  Crypto-Mind podcast here.

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.

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.

[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 conducting Learning Reviews, a critical new practice for building resilient, people-first learning organizations. This episode is for you if you’re interested in learning about: soft-skills, career, or management. Continue Reading

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

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 Engineering at Autopay, founded Tricalyx, and was VP of Product Strategic Systems at Monster.

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, ADHD and Down Syndrome. Prior to working at Goally, Ed was a Director of Engineering at Qualcomm where he created and led a global team working on 4G LTE. ——————————————————————————————————- This week’s episode is sponsored by GitPrime. Subjective measures like story points and tickets only tell part of the story of software development. GitPrime gives engineering managers the full picture with metrics in context on team productivity. So you can spot risk, identify waste, move faster, and advocate for your team with hard data instead of a narrative. Stop flying blind — and start leading engineering with concrete data. More at gitprime.com

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 industry by providing big data logistical solutions. ——————————————————————————————————- This week’s episode is sponsored by GitPrime. Subjective measures like story points and tickets only tell part of the story of software development. GitPrime gives engineering managers the full picture with metrics in context on team productivity. So you can spot risk, identify waste, move faster, and advocate for your team with hard data instead of a narrative. Stop flying blind — and start leading engineering with concrete data. More at gitprime.com

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 turning on and off, its because miles set up the session to have the lights down low, kind of like a campfire ghost story type of atmosphere. Enjoy yall!