StartupCTO.io

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 organizational change, maximizing team effectiveness and helping people reach their potential.

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 in society will be made redundant.  This shift will have both positive and negative consequences for individuals’ lives, society, and the economy, which is why it is important to start understanding the trends and preparing now. Join Jeff Rose, CEO of Boulder AI company ThinkTopic, to discuss the technology, economic and political landscape of our automated future.

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:    

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:

Todays 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. Michael has written two books. His first book “Managing Humans, 3rd Edition” is a popular guide to the art of engineering leadership and clearly explains that while you be rewarded for what you build, you will only be successful because of your people. His second book “Being Geek” is a career handbook for geeks and nerds alike. Michael plays hockey, mountain bikes, tinkers with drones, and drinks red wine in the redwoods of Northern California whenever he can because staying sane is more important than staying busy. Favorite Quotes: Continue Reading

Todays 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 Ocean Manuel Mattke — Chief Innovation Officer at Opportunity Education Maria Gutierrez & Glenn Vanderburg — Maria is VP Engineering at FreeAgent and Glen is VP Engineering at First.

Todays 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 appearance: Patrick McKenzie – independent software developer Story misplacing your pager and being unaware of your outage Travis Kimmel – CEO of GitPrime Story about after launch the dance of cleaning up your early assumptions and building new features Jay Zeschin, Lead Architect at ello Story of “blowing up”, getting tens of thousands of users, and VC funding all at once. Jud Valeski – CTO at GNIP, acquired by twitter Story about screening your customers for success Enjoy!

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.

Todays 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 architecture.  He is presently a mentor at Techstars and the VP Engineering at Cognizant QuickLeft.   Continue Reading

Todays 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 deliver great analytics software. Continue Reading

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 a lot more information about the

Todays 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 ebb & flow of a CTO’s responsibilities as a company scales massively, and learn about how SendGrid’s culture has been defined by the 4 H’s: honest, hungry, humble, and happy. Continue Reading

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.  Everyone shares their revenue.  They share their strategies for growing and marketing their business.  We built community through transparency. You can go on Techcrunch and you can hear about the Snapchats or Uberes of the world.  But you can’t learn about Joe the Hacker who is running a $2k/ month business. The cultures could not be more different (bootstrapped vs VC backed).   Instead of worrying about raising money from VCs and building a billion dollar company, you could instead focus on your product and solving for a need that your customers will pay money for. A lot of startup founders don’t achieve their goals because the bar is set so astronomically high.  In a VC funded startup, sometimes if you don’t reach that goal, your expected value goes to zero. Indie Hackers community has a lot of people who are making $1k or $2k/mo per side project while working a full time job.  That’s basically like giving themselves a raise. I wish more people knew you didn’t have to do this crazy all or nothing thing. The tech press is incentivized by what gets the most eyeballs, which is inevitably going to be the craziest most flashy stories with the biggest numbers possible.  The unicorns is what they call them now.  This venture capital narrative is fed to everybody. There’s binary outcomes with VC funded companies.  They tend to either fail spectacularly or succeed spectacularly.  They give you advice and resources that push you to those binary outcomes.  I wish people were aware you could build businesses in more of a traditional way, getting revenue from day 1. Having all of our interviews be transparent was an important value from the start.  I wasn’t going to publish any interviews where the founder wasn’t going to be transparent about how they build the business.   I was building Indie Hackers for myself, thinking of the time in which I was trying to build a side business myself. I get inspired by putting myself in the interviewees shoes and seeing the kind of decisions they made to get to where they are. If you want to start a company, start a company in an area you’re interested in or want to learn about.   I need to read books, I need to learn about business, marketing, growth, if I want to be able to curate good interviews.

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

Our guest today is Zack Bomsta, CTO of Owlet, which produces the Owlet Baby Monitor. In addition to growing the team, he is involved 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. Continue Reading