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(review this episode on iTunes) This week’s episode is a Boulder Startup Week talk featuring Jeff Rose, the Founder and CEO of ThinkTopic.  Jeff’s expertise is in operating systems, algorithms, neural networks, image processing and information retrieval.   Jeff’s talk is about Artificial Intelligence;which has seen a lot of hype recently from big dollar startup acquisitions to doomsday predictions. These lead to more questions than answers such as – What is at the core of AI advancements? What’s driving the hype? And what are the true promises and perils of a “super intelligence?” Jeff will walk through the design of the neocortex, how the mechanism of the human brain translates to AI software, and the reasons why machine learning is taking off today. Finally, get a “hype-free” view of its potential while engaging in some fun thought experiments on future AI utopias and dystopias. Don’t miss out on future episodes! Subscribe quickly at StartupCTO.io/subscribe.

(review this episode on iTunes) This week’s episode has Dan Jones, the Founder and CTO of VictorOps. Dan has years of experience building highly scalable, distributed systems and started VictorOps to help engineers building those systems get notifications when things go sideways (even if it’s 3 AM) and fix those problems with the entire team’s knowledge and experience at their disposal (even if it’s 3 AM). Don’t miss out on future episodes! Subscribe quickly at StartupCTO.io/subscribe.

(review this episode on iTunes) This week’s episode is a talk by Greg Schafer, presented at the ‘Future of Tech’ track at Boulder Startup Week.    Greg is an engineer at Occipital, a full stack Spatial Computing company based in Boulder Colorado.  Greg’s talk is entitled ‘Connecting Humans in Virtual Reality’.  In it, Greg articulates an optimistic vision for humanities future of people being connected, to their passions and to each other, through the immersive technology that is known as ‘Virtual Reality’. Find Greg on twitter @ https://twitter.com/grschafer and find Occipital at Occipital.com. Don’t miss out on future episodes! Subscribe quickly at StartupCTO.io/subscribe. Transcript: Intro: Welcome to this week’s episode this week we’ll be continuing our Boulder startup week, the future of tech events and we have a talk from Greg Shaffer. Greg is a backend engineer at Octipital he’ll be talking about Virtual Reality. If you’ve never tried VR this might not be for you. There’s a certain amount of presence that modern VR headsets, like the HTC Vive and the Oculis Rift create for their users. A lot of folks that I’ve talked to who are skeptics have just never tried it. But I’ve never talked to someone who is a total skeptic after trying VR. If you’ve never experienced VR, it’s probably worth getting a Google cardboard, they’re only ten bucks on Amazon and getting enough VR experiences under your belt before listening to this episode. Alright enough with the caveats. Greg’s talk is about connecting humans in VR. In his talk, Greg presents a vision for the future where VR is not a medium for escapism but rather a medium for education, training and connecting people with their passions and to each other. Enjoy! Greg Schafer: I’m talking about connecting humans in VR and there are a lot of visions of the future where we isolate ourselves we build up incredible machines and artificial intelligences that that look after us and anticipate our needs they’re just really really helpful. But more seriously, the technologies we’re building and the technologies from stories of the near future, they engage us more forcefully than any natural thing has. They manipulate our chemistry and our sense of self. They can enthrall us and in more extreme versions of these stories they can turn around and enslave us. So these visions of the future they might be easy to dismiss. They are sci fi or whatever but thats the thing about technology is that it moves really really fast and that’s especially true of virtual reality. Things are gonna change so fast in ways that people can’t really predict and in some ways we’re not all that far away from being constantly plugged in and seeing virtual worlds as our home and as where we belong. I’m not here to be an alarmist or the fear monger about this, I just want to emphasize that VR is incredibly powerful and it represents a huge opportunity for us to grow more connected rather than more isolated. There’s a lab in Stanford that’s been running psychology and sociology experiments in VR for over a decade an they’ve had a lot of interesting results about how powerful or effective VR is for different things and this a quote from the director where he compares retroology to Uranium, where he says it’s this really powerful thing saying it can heat homes, it can destroy nations. It’s all about how we use it. So he wants us to try to create positive experiences, because of a very tense experience in the virtual world, changes you in the real

(review this episode on iTunes) This week’s episode is the final interview from the “How to CTO” event at Boulder Startup Week, an interview with Scott Brave. Scott is the CTO of FullContact, a company in Denver with teams in Europe and Asia, so he has some really interesting advice on distributed workforces. Also, Scott is an academic researcher in a former life and is the best person I’ve ever talked to about algorithms and scaling engineering. Find Scott on twitter @ https://twitter.com/sbrave and find FullContact at FullContact.com. Don’t miss out on future episodes! Subscribe quickly at StartupCTO.io/subscribe.

(review this episode on iTunes) This week’s episode is a talk on privacy-centric cryptocurrencies by Zooko Wilcox. Zooko has more than 20 years of experience in open, decentralized systems, cryptography and information security, and startups. He is recognized for his work on DigiCash, Mojo Nation, ZRTP, “Zooko’s Triangle”, Tahoe-LAFS, BLAKE2, and SPHINCS. Find zooko on twitter @ https://twitter.com/zooko and find ZCash at https://z.cash/ Don’t miss out on future episodes! Subscribe quickly at StartupCTO.io/subscribe.

(review this episode on iTunes) Jay Zeschin is a co-founder and the Chief Architect at Ello. Jay sits down with Miles during the “How to CTO” event at Boulder Startup Week to talk about what it’s like managing a team of engineers when everything is going really well and when you’re getting so much traffic and users that the CTO of Heroku calls you to see if they can help. Follow Jay on twitter and ello at @jayzes. Don’t miss out on future episodes! Subscribe quickly at StartupCTO.io/subscribe.

(review this episode on iTunes) Piper Merriam is a Senior Software Engineer at QuickLeft and a contributor to the Ethereum Project.  In his talk at the Boulder Startup Week 2016, he presents his vision for “The World in 2026”; a world in which the world is transformed by Cryptocurrency & Smart Contracts Follow Piper on twitter at @pipermerriam. Don’t miss out on future episodes! Subscribe quickly at StartupCTO.io/subscribe.

(review this episode on iTunes) In this week’s episode, we listen to another interview from the “How to CTO” event from Boulder Startup Week. This interview is Aprille Jordan, the Director of Technology at Katasi. In the episode, we talk about hiring, growing out of an MVP, and diversity. See more about Aprille and her team at Katasi.com. Don’t miss out on future episodes! Subscribe quickly at StartupCTO.io/subscribe.

(review this episode on iTunes) Vikas is co-founder of Occipital, a mobile computer vision startup in Boulder Colorado.    Occipital is working on making mobile phones “see” like humans do, and in this special episode recorded at Boulder Startup Week, Vikas will make some predictions about the future of spatial computing. Follow Vikas on twitter at @vikasreddy. Don’t miss out on future episodes! Subscribe quickly at StartupCTO.io/subscribe.  

(review this episode on iTunes) Last week was Boulder Startup Week here in Boulder, and as the development track lead, Miles held an event called “How to CTO” where 4 area startup CTOs were interviewed by Miles in front of an audience of about a 100. In the first of the interviews, Miles talks to Nader Akhnoukh from Kapost. The conversation includes product engineers, managing a larger size team, remote working, and a good war story. See more at Kapost.com and find Nader on Twitter at @iamnader. Don’t miss out on future episodes! Subscribe quickly at StartupCTO.io/subscribe.

(review this episode on iTunes) Diana has a PhD from MIT, is the CTO of ResilientOps, an organizer at Analyze Boulder, and an Instructor of Business Analytics at CU Boulder. Find Diana on twitter at twitter.com/dianam. Find Miles on twitter at twitter.com/miles_matthias. Find Kevin on twitter at twitter.com/owocki. Don’t miss out on future episodes! Subscribe quickly at StartupCTO.io/subscribe.

(review this episode on iTunes) Kevin is an engineer at Occipital, a Techstars alumni, organizer for Boulder Startup Week, and co-founder of Ignighter. Hear Kevin’s entrepreneurial story and hear about some of the recruiting, engineering, and culture challenges in the Boulder Startup scene. Find Miles on twitter at twitter.com/miles_matthias. Find Kevin on twitter at twitter.com/owocki. Don’t miss out on future episodes! Subscribe quickly at StartupCTO.io/subscribe.

(review this episode on iTunes) Miles is CTO at @EquityEats.  Hear EquityEat’s founding story, and hear about some technology and product challenges in the equity crowdfunding space. Find Miles on twitter at twitter.com/miles_matthias. Find Kevin on twitter at twitter.com/owocki. Don’t miss out on future episodes! Subscribe quickly at StartupCTO.io/subscribe.