Jorge Torres, CEO & Co-founder @ MindsDB, shares how his lifelong entrepreneurial spirit helped encourage him to pursue engineering & why an engineering background is an amazing asset for founders. He also shares valuable insights he has learned along the way, including why it’s important for founders to make plans in order to execute well, tips for creating alignment within your org, and strategically building a community approach within your product strategy.

ABOUT JORGE TORRES

Jorge Torres is CEO & Co-founder @ MindsDB. Jorge is a visiting scholar at the University of California Berkeley researching machine learning automation and explainability, an advocate for the open source community, and prior to MindsDB he worked with Aneesh Chopra (the first CTO in the US government) building data systems that analyze billions of patient’s records that led to savings for millions of patients.

"Truly there's a lot of things that you don't know when you're starting a company, maybe even things that you don't even know that you don't know, but at least the first steps of risk, which is, 'Can I get something off the ground by myself if I have to?' And that's a very, very, very attractive angle of being an engineer and you learn some skills and then the training of an engineer is how do you take tools are out there and build something?”

- Jorge Torres   

ABOUT MINDSDB

MindsDB is end-to-end AI platform for developers. It connects real-time data and AI/ML models, providing tools and automation that enable developers to build, launch, and maintain AI-powered applications efficiently. The company was founded in 2017 by Jorge Torres and Adam Carrigan and has raised more than $50M in funding from Mayfield, Nvidia's NVentures, Benchmark, YCombinator, and others.

Interested in joining an ELC Peer Group?

ELCs Peer Groups provide a virtual, curated, and ongoing peer learning opportunity to help you navigate the unknown, uncover solutions and accelerate your learning with a small group of trusted peers.

Apply to join a peer group HERE: sfelc.com/peerGroups

SHOW NOTES:

• Why Monday is Jorge’s favorite day of the week (1:55)
• Jorge’s approach to becoming a founder & starting MindsDB (2:32)
• Skills engineers can develop to prepare for being a founder (4:26)
• Benefits of having engineering skills & background as a founder/CEO (6:42)
• The story behind Jorge’s risk assessment strategy & deciding to found MindsDB (8:02)
• Questions to ask to help founders narrow their focus (10:15)
• Why everything founders try that isn’t well planned doesn’t work well (12:08)
• How this insight is leveraged within MindsDB’s open-source community (14:55)
• Building alignment as the team grows (18:08)
• The importance of letting go of things as you build your business (20:15)
• Using intuition in the early days of MindsDB’s product / business approach (23:08)
• The relationship between community & business (24:51)
• Inside Jorge’s approach to modular pieces that drive growth (27:56)
• What the next iteration looks like for the SF AI Collective community (29:45)
• Rapid fire questions (32:13)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• The Broken Earth Trilogy - N. K. Jemisin’s captivating science fiction/fantasy series that follows the journey of a woman with the power to control earthquakes as she navigates a world on the brink of destruction.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

In this episode, Karan Talati (Co-founder & CEO @ First Resonance) joins us to discuss strategies for identifying a market opportunity and some of his favorite perspectives on product building. We cover what it’s like identifying something that may not be necessary now but will be in the future; how to assess / validate a hypothesis; frameworks for assessing emerging trends & pain points in order to develop a product; and navigating the balance between offering your customers breadth vs. depth with your product offering. Additionally, Karan shares how he approached building First Resonance’s product and recommendations for closing on customers who work in a mission-critical space.

ABOUT KARAN TALATI

Karan Talati is Co-founder & CEO @ First Resonance. Previously he built data and automation systems to enable rocket reusability at SpaceX and engineering consumer electronics at Motorola. At First Resonance, they’re solving manufacturing’s biggest challenges. Organizations use their factory operating system, ION, to accelerate and optimize their production processes from prototyping to production.

"If people are going to be equally ambitious on the next generation of whatever needs to be solved in the world, let's say next generation satellites. Well, then how are they going to do it? The following our gut was like, 'Hey, what would the world have looked like or what would our experience have been like if the kind of that digital connectivity layer that we had to build was actually available for us? And what could it look like if we bring something out to market that does that? Does that actually allow for new types of hardware to be created, new types of companies to be formed, so on and so forth?'”

- Karan Talati   

SHOW NOTES:

• Karan’s Friday & Sunday cadences as a founder (2:02)
• The origin story of Karan founding First Resonance (4:49)
• Karan’s time @ SpaceX & experiencing his first rocket launch / landing (8:14)
• How First Resonance celebrates its customers & successes (10:36)
• The moment when Karan saw a market opportunity for First Resonance (12:10)
• Understanding that something may not be necessary yet, but will be in the future (15:47)
• Questions that helped form Karan’s early hypotheses & how to validate a hypothesis (19:10)
• Strategies for assessing emerging trends & validating pain points (22:47)
• Ideating data / software solutions for the manufacturing space (25:48)
• Karan’s framework for first approaching the First Resonance product (28:15)
• Navigating the balance between offering 10x vertically vs. 10x breadth (30:35)
• An example of when Karan had to make an inclusion vs. exclusion decision (32:33)
• Customer relationship considerations & gaining your first customer (37:04)
• Recommendations for closing on the first customer in a mission-critical industry (39:54)
• Rapid fire questions (41:10)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• The Qualified Sales Leader: Proven Lessons from a Five Time CRO - John McMahon provides enterprise software sales leaders and their sales reps proven methods to sell more by quantifying business value for the customer and selling major company solutions to C level executives. No tricks, no shortcuts, just simple ways in which sales leaders can help their sales reps sell more software by closing more deals.
• Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Esteemed presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s modern classic about the political genius of Abraham Lincoln, his unlikely presidency, and his cabinet of former political foes.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Ramiro Berrelleza, Founder and CEO @ Okteto, shares how his company transitioned from an open-source project to a category-creating commercial product and repeatable sales model. He reveals the benefits & opportunities of open source and the potential for community buy-in. Plus strategies for creating a repeatable sales model, how open source projects can guide early-stage decisions, when to begin identifying / building customer personas, prioritization strategies for engineering resources, and recommendations for early-stage hiring, especially for your first marketing hire.

ABOUT RAMIRO BERRELLEZA

Ramiro Berrelleza is the CEO and Co-founder of Okteto, the leading platform for Development Experience Automation. With over 20 years of experience in engineering, Ramiro is a seasoned professional with a passion for building developer tooling.

A visionary, Ramiro is always looking for ways to improve the software development process. He firmly believes that building modern applications is a team sport and understands the importance of removing friction from the development process. He is also a passionate advocate for building a more inclusive tech industry. With Ramiro at the helm, Okteto is well-positioned to continue to grow and shape the way companies architect development experience for their teams.

"Once you're building something commercial, the person that buys your product is not the same person that's gonna use your product and is not the same person that's gonna approve the purchase for your product. So that's already something that when it comes to distribution, when it comes to how you price it, when it comes to like how you talk about the product, that's one of the earliest things that you have to understand because if you don't understand this then you're going to start hitting all these walls.”

- Ramiro Berrelleza   

SHOW NOTES:

• Ramiro’s founder journey & the origins of Okteto (1:49)
• Why Okteto’s founders started it as an open-source project (4:06)
• The benefits & opportunities of starting as Okteto open source project (6:19)
• Transitioning from open-source to commercial (8:39)
• Embrace the community aspect of open-source (11:30)
• How the open-source community can guide early-day founder decisions (13:17)
• Ramiro’s method for identifying Okteto’s personas & its impact on GTM strategy (16:08)
• Using personas to determine what your product is lacking & how to package it (19:04)
• Building a product with the developer persona in mind (21:32)
• Which stage of the founder journey is best for identifying personas (24:30)
• How to prioritize engineering resources in the org’s early days (27:08)
• The importance of shipping a complete experience (29:39)
• Ramiro’s thoughts on the sequence of early-stage hiring (31:58)
• Qualities to look for in your first marketing hire (34:46)
• Tips for hiring someone who is transitioning from big tech to a startup (37:15)
• Why it’s worth hiring folks who can pull their own weight (39:28)
• Rapid fire questions (41:59)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• The Founders' Paradox - Aishwarya Khan Bhaduri’s book that shines a light on the illusion of progressiveness, the daunting challenges of exploitation, and the cutthroat competition that defines the start-up landscape.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

In this episode, Roni Dover, CTO @ Digma, shares the customer communication models and user interview tactics that can help shape your product, how to minimize biases from entering these conversations, the advantages of incorporating critical feedback alongside positive feedback, and how to leverage in-person conversations with your product’s audience. Roni also shares his experience as an introverted eng leader who needed to develop more extroverted traits as CTO and the frameworks that helped him find his voice. Additionally, we address how to grow your product for a specific audience, gaining more users, expanding your product, and more.

ABOUT RONI DOVER

Holistic developer and builder with a passion for development processes and practices. Afflicted by an acute Product Manager/Developer split personality disorder that was never treated. Currently, CTO and co-founder of Digma (digma.ai), an IDE plugin for code runtime AI analysis to help accelerate development in complex codebases. A big believer in evidence-based development, and a proponent of Continuous Feedback in all aspects of Software Engineering.

"Get your first 10 users. That's the first thing you need to do. Why? Because if you don't have currently, right now, a user on your platform, you have no feedback. You don't know anything. You did your idea validation. You created a product. Until a user uses that product and tells you, 'Oh my God, this is crap.' or 'Oh my God, this is the best thing since sliced bread.', you don't have any real perspective on what you've done.

- Roni Dover   

SHOW NOTES:

• The origin story of Digma AI & Roni’s journey as a developer (1:49)
• How Digma tackles a gap in the DevOps cycle (3:33)
• Approaches for introverted eng leaders who need to develop extroverted qualities (6:29)
• Roni’s process for finding his voice through writing (8:25)
• Tactics for communicating with your audience (10:52)
• What Roni’s customer conversation model looks like (13:29)
• Use an external party to minimize biases from entering conversations (16:25)
• Frameworks for overcoming biases / preconceptions about your product (18:32)
• The importance of balancing positive & critical feedback (21:06)
• Taking advantage of conferences for face-to-face conversations (23:04)
• Avoid making a product for a general audience & embrace specificity (26:04)
• Best practices for growing your user base & gathering initial feedback (30:17)
• Strategies for expanding your product & getting more users (32:54)
• How building community interacts with PLG strategy (36:09)
• Navigating good customer communication w/ the fear of being too pushy (38:43)
• Rapid fire questions (41:38)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you. - Rob Fitzpatrick’s quick and easy handbook about how to get more learning and more sales out of your customer conversations. Even when everyone is lying to you.
• CI/CD/CF? — The Devops Toolchain’s “Missing-Link” - Roni’s blog post about continuous feedback.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Buchi Reddy Busi Reddy, Co-Founder & CEO @ Levo.ai, joins us to reveal how lessons learned as an eng leader at AppDynamics and other Silicon Valley experiences provided him with the skills & inspiration to co-found Levo.ai. We cover considerations for building security-focused products as a start-up; finding product-market fit & securing your first customers; identifying your product’s champion & finding the data / narratives that support your product; and pricing strategies. Additionally, Buchi shares his personal story of navigating the personal & logistical considerations of attaining an H1-B visa, providing valuable insight for any immigrant founders.

ABOUT BUCHI REDDY BUSI REDDY

Buchi is the CEO and co-founder of Levo.ai, which is on a mission to protect all the APIs and apps in the world to make the digital world more secure. Buchi is a domain expert in APM (Application Performance Management), Observability, distributed tracing and API security areas. He has built multiple enterprise SaaS products in his career. Buchi lives with his wife and son in Bay Area. Loves hiking and dad time.

"Listen to the customers, listen to the companies and that champion will probably make it a bit easier for you to sell to that company. The champion by definition is bought into the concept of they know this problem exists and they can tell inside the company that this problem is there and we need a solution and they also bought into the fact that they like your solution and they would like to buy it. The biggest thing is finding the champion. If you do that, your life becomes a lot more easy.”

- Buchi Reddy Busi Reddy   

Join us at ELC Annual 2023!

ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical prove strategies.

Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco

For tickets, head to https://sfelc.com/annual2023

SHOW NOTES:

• Buchi’s leadership journey throughout Silicon Valley w/ AppDynamics & more (1:41)
• What inspired Buchi to transition from eng leadership to founding (5:13)
• The role of commitment in overcoming founder challenges & building resiliency (7:43)
• Strategies for filtering & focusing your ideas (9:42)
• Consider the personal risks of the H1-B visa journey (12:02)
• Navigating the logistical side of the H1-B visa process (14:05)
• Eng leadership lessons from past experiences that Buchi is manifesting @ Levo (15:57)
• Buchi’s experience releasing Levo & securing its first customers (19:57)
• Insights on identifying & motivating your champion (22:10)
• Data / stories that Buchi provided to support the product (24:28)
• How & why Buchi determined Levo’s pricing models (28:06)
• Questions to help evaluate / organize the pricing model thought process (30:42)
• Tactics for communicating as a founder without technical language & buzzwords (33:51)
• Rapid fire questions (36:17)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• The Best One Yet - Feel brighter every day with our 20-minute pop-biz podcast. The 3 business news stories you need, with fresh takes you can pretend you came up with — Pairs perfectly with your morning oatmeal ritual.
• The Tim Ferriss Show - Tim Ferriss deconstructs world-class performers from eclectic areas (investing, chess, pro sports, etc.), digging deep to find the tools, tactics, and tricks that listeners can use.
• All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - Industry veterans, degenerate gamblers & besties Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks & David Friedberg cover all things economic, tech, political, social & poker.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Arya Asemanfar, Co-Founder @ Runway, joins us to share how he transitioned from eng leader to co-founder & strategies for both pre & and post-product market fit! We also cover how to determine if you and your potential co-founder are a good match, core principles & primitives that inform Runway’s product strategy, why you should pay attention to how a product makes users feel, strategies for transitioning with ease throughout your org’s evolutions, and implementing learning loops in your org.

ABOUT ARYA ASEMANFAR

Arya is co-founder and CTO of Runway, a modern, beautiful product funded by a16z to help business and finance leaders truly understand and collaborate together for the first time. Prior to Runway, Arya was Head of Product at Lightstep, Tech Lead at Mixpanel, and was one of 3 Principal Engineers at Twitter where he led engineering efforts on the main Timeline product.

"I discovered this book, The Extended Mind, and this concept of offloading. She describes it as being able to take your thoughts or your ideas and offload them out of your head onto something like paper or a whiteboard. What that does is it actually reduces the cognitive load that you have as a person solving a problem or doing some work.

You offload it onto the products or onto the too and it actually frees your mind to do more. It can be faster, it can come up with new ideas, it can make more connections. The tool or the product can be an extension of your mind and so I was like, ‘Hey Siqi, you should listen to this and see if this is what you meant.’ 

And it was like a light bulb moment. ‘Yes, this is it!’”

- Arya Asemanfar   

ABOUT RUNWAY

Business financials got stuck in the 15th century so Runway is showing them today’s computers 🖥- Runway is a SaaS product that helps you and your team understand your business so you can make better decisions together. Unlike other financial software, Runway is designed to be a consumer-grade product for normal people who aren't accountants, and is fast, intuitive, and social.

Runway reinvents how business financials are presented through modern design and engineering. By bringing clarity, power, and speed to financial data, they help every team become more aligned on the entire business so they can collaborate to make better decisions, faster.

Join us for one of our in-person community events!

That's right! We're hosting in-person community events in San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, and Chicago! Break out of your comfort zone and join us in a casual environment to connect, problem-solve, and support each other in our engineering leadership journeys.

Don't see your city on the list? No problem!

Reach out to Tim at Tim@sfelc.com and let's bring ELC to you - and make it happen!

To get involved email our Head of Community Tim at Tim@sfelc.com

SHOW NOTES:

• Arya’s background & the early days at Runway (2:24)
• How Arya & Siqi reconnected to co-found Runway (5:18)
• Determining if you’re a good match as co-founders (6:37)
• What made hiring in the early stages of Runway easy (8:38)
• Why Arya made the jump from eng leader @ LightStep to co-founder (9:52)
• Core principles & primitives that inform Runway’s product strategy (12:01)
• Pay attention to how a product makes you feel (15:14)
• Examples of how Runway imbues feeling into its product (18:23)
• Tips for instilling this paradigm in your team in the early product-building phase (20:03)
• Lessons learned throughout Runway’s product evolutions (21:42)
• How working/building the Runway product has evolved over time (25:32)
• What Arya’s learning process between Runway’s iterations looked like (27:48)
• Arya’s strategies for building out your engineering org (30:43)
• Frameworks for determining pre- & post-product market fit (32:46)
• Runway’s current learning loops (34:40)
• Rapid fire questions (37:16)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• First Round Capital Co-founder Questionnaire - 50 questions spanning across six categories designed to test compatibility with a potential co-founder.
• The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain - Anne Murphy Paul’s book that reveals how we can tap the intelligence that exists beyond our brains—in our bodies, our surroundings, and our relationships.
• Ezra Klein Interviews Anne Murphy Paul on The Extended Mind
• No Stupid Questions - Stephen J. Dubner ****and research psychologist Angela Duckworth really like to ask people questions, and came to believe there’s no such thing as a stupid one. So they made a podcast where they can ask each other as many “stupid questions” as they want.
• The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly And Others Don’t - Julia Galef’s book that shows that what makes scouts better at getting things right isn’t that they’re smarter or more knowledgeable than everyone else. It’s a handful of emotional skills, habits, and ways of looking at the world that anyone can learn.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Tri Ahmad Irfan, Co-Founder & CTO @ Lumina, discusses his journey identifying large-scale problems in the SE Asian market and how they went from a Google form MVP to 1 million+ users! Additionally, we cover how to formulate / test / prove hypotheses about product-market fit, how Maslow’s hierarchy of needs informs product strategy, determining a potential customer’s willingness to pay, resources for researching consumer acquisition strategies, and his favorite lessons for early-stage founders.

ABOUT TRI AHMAD IRFAN

Tri Ahmad Irfan (@irfan3) is the co-founder and CTO of Lumina, a community platform that helps underserved workers in Southeast Asia to upskill and secure better jobs. Launched in early 2022, Lumina has served over a million job seekers and is funded by Y Combinator, and Monk's Hill Ventures.

Before Lumina, Irfan built out the engineering teams at fast-growth startups in Southeast Asia such as GudangAda, a wholesale marketplace, and STOQO, a B2B platform for food and beverage businesses. In college, Irfan interned at Twitter in San Francisco and spent some time doing competitive programming.

"I started with building a Google form and sending it out to a lot of people I know and I met and in return, I received like 10,000 profiles into this Google form. That's when I realized, ‘Okay, this can be something big.’ The app itself only launched six months ago and we have around 1 million users now.”

- Tri Ahmad Irfan   

Check out our friends and sponsor, Jellyfish

To learn more about Jellyfish and how they can help you increase engineering satisfaction and create happier, higher-performing engineering teams.

Learn more at Jellyfish.co/elc

Join us for one of our in-person community events!

That's right! We're hosting in-person community events in San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, and Chicago! Break out of your comfort zone and join us in a casual environment to connect, problem-solve, and support each other in our engineering leadership journeys.

Don't see your city on the list? No problem!

Reach out to Tim at Tim@sfelc.com and let's bring ELC to you - and make it happen!

To get involved email our Head of Community Tim at Tim@sfelc.com

SHOW NOTES:

• How Tri’s background inspired him to start Lumina (2:03)
• The motivation behind jumping into Lumina full-time (3:17)
• Challenges faced building the product up from an MVP (7:36)
• Using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to inform product strategy (10:16)
• Frameworks as a founder for identifying a large-scale problem & creating a solution (12:46)
• How Tri formulated & tested his hypotheses about product-market fit (14:00)
• Questions to determine a potential customer’s willingness to pay (17:18)
• How Lumina transitioned from a Google form MVP to its current platform (19:54)
• The market strategy to reach 1 million users & how it shifts to attract the next phase of the business (22:24)
• Tri’s favorite resources for researching consumer acquisition strategies (26:21)
• What happens when you discover a hypothesis isn’t true (27:29)
• Lessons for early-stage founders that Tri learned from past experiences (28:57)
• Who were Lumina’s early key hires to scale up operations (30:59)
• Rapid fire questions (32:33)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• https://irfan.blog/ - Tri’s personal website
• Talent - Renowned economist Tyler Cowen and venture capitalist and entrepreneur Daniel Gross set out to study the art and science of finding talent at the highest level: the people with the creativity, drive, and insight to transform an organization and make everyone around them better.
• The Witcher - In the Witcher saga, Andrzej Sapkowski introduces his hero, Geralt of Rivia, a witcher. He’s an itinerant mercenary. He kills monsters for money. His strange physique, with white hair and cat-like eyes, distinguishes him from other people, who reject him because of it. He’s an exceptionally powerful mutant who occasionally resorts to magic. Both feared and scorned by the powerless as well as the powerful, who see him as someone dangerous and impossible to retain. His honor code forbids him from killing if he can avoid it, and not to attack monsters unless they pose a real threat. He’s got a strong character, but he still has a human side: he doesn't always emerge from battle unscathed. Set in an imaginary medieval world enhanced with magic and monsters, the Witcher saga will surprise you: the monster isn’t always who you think it is!
• Y Combinator - One of Tri’s favorite founder resources that works intensively with companies for three months, to get them into the best possible shape and refine their pitch to investors.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

We’re going to take a breath on the CTO Connection podcast for the next 3-4 weeks. When we first started the podcast, it was a “startup CTO podcast”. We’ve really enjoyed sharing the wisdom and experience of our guests on building and managing engineering teams at startups. However, we’ve seen over time that the challenges of running (say) a 5-20 person engineering team are very different from those involved when running a 200+ person org. And as many of our original startup CTOs have scaled their orgs to 200 people and beyond, we’ve decided to follow them.
Because of that, we’re going to refocus the podcast, the content, the summits, and the community on “geeks who lead at scale” - senior engineering leaders in larger companies with 200+ full-time employees in product/engineering. In that way, we’ll be able to provide information that is more consistently tuned to one of the most challenging tasks out there - leading engineering orgs at scale.
At the same time as we make the community more exclusive, we’re also going to make it more inclusive. Whether you’re running data, security, IT, or software development, there are many similarities when you’re working within a company of around 500 - 10,000 employees. I’ve been involved with a number of “CTO” clubs across the US and in each case, I’ve seen the benefits of having a range of roles (from CIO and CISO to CDO and CTO - as well as directors and VPs of Software, Platform, Data/Analytics, and Security), as many of the challenges are the same, and it means the community has deeper expertise in a number of key topics if a CDO wants to learn more about engineering best practices for their data team or a CTO needs a hot take on an AppSec challenge they’re facing.
I am disappointed that - given our limited resources - we won’t be able to continue the focus on content specifically tailored to startup CTOs, but I look forward to refining our focus so we can scale our ability to share experiences and insights from and between geeks who lead at scale.

• https://www.twitter.com/hannah_omu

• Cover Legends by HoliznaCC0 is licensed CC0 1.0 Universal License.
• Your host is Timothée (Tim) Bourguignon, more about him at timbourguignon.fr.
• Gift the podcast a rating on one of the significant platforms https://devjourney.info/subscribe

Jesse White grew with the company over at OpenNMS, from developer through to hands on CTO. He started with a team of just five, but as the company and the team grew, he founds himself working longer and longer hours until he finally burned out. After taking time to get back in balance, he returned to continue running the org. In this interview, we discuss the journey and the lessons learned.

PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else. Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

In this episode, we explore the story of Adam Oliner, CEO & Founder @ Graft and discuss his perspectives on building business models, considerations around early business strategy, best practices for activating your network (if you’re anti-networking), and lessons from their recent pre-seed round & product-building bias toward ease of use! Plus, we dive into what it's like to be a founder with young kids, the impact of family on day-to-day operations and company values!

ABOUT ADAM OLINER

Adam is the CEO & Founder at Graft, which aims to make the AI of the 1% accessible to the 99%. Before that, he led machine learning teams at Slack and Splunk. Adam was a postdoctoral scholar in the EECS Department at UC Berkeley, working in the AMP Lab, which specialized in cloud computing and Big Data. He earned a PhD in computer science from Stanford University and a MEng in EECS from MIT, where he also earned degrees in computer science and mathematics.

“I would kind of scoff at the like, ‘Oh, it's not what you know, it's who you know,’ because I was an academic. Of course it's what you know. That's the whole point.

Now of course I understand that it is in fact both. If you only have a network, then your only power is to inspire that network, but if you also have the knowledge and the skills and can activate a network of people by inspiring them to help come solve that problem with you, then I think you have the ingredients to really solve hard problems and build great companies.

I don't think either one is sufficient by itself, and that was not a perspective I had before.”

- Adam Oliner   

SHOW NOTES:

• Three questions to determine if this company will be successful and the origin story of Graft (2:25)
• How Graft identified the problem in AI/ML infrastructure for the 99% (6:58)
• When should you make introduction and customer discovery calls? (13:01)
• Co-founders, scaling, self-sufficient infrastructure and other lessons Adam learned from his first start-up (16:35)
• Clarifying questions for your product-building strategy and business plan (23:38)
• The biggest founder lessons from earning a PhD (25:34)
• Dissolving the barrier between ego and craft (30:18)
• Internal and external challenges from Adam’s founder experience (32:50)
• Activating your network (even if you’re “anti-networking”) (36:48)
• The importance of amplifying and praising your network (41:31)
• Why you should bias your products to be easy-to-use (43:36)
• Rapid fire questions (45:42)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• The Books of Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin’s critically acclaimed series of high fantasy novels about mages and sorcerers set in on a fictional group of islands called Earthsea.

These days it’s quite possible to be hacking on an idea in a dorm room one week, and just a few weeks later to be the CTO of a venture backed startup. Unfortunately, jumping straight from college to the C suite can be problematic as the organization scales and the CTO needs to bring to bear various types of management that they may not have experienced or practiced before.

This week, our guest - Ron Lichty shares his experiences of working with engineering leaders to help them to think about the various types and levels of management - from managing individual contributors through managing managers, functional areas, and eventually an entire function like engineering. He also shares some thoughts on how the things that can make you successful at one level can stop you from succeeding at the next. 

It’s a great model for decomposing the various kinds of management skills required by a CTO and much of it comes from the book “The Leadership Pipeline” which was designed as a book to help companies to grow their leaders but which also provides a very coherent framework for thinking about the various levels of management required as an organization scales.

PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else. Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Dr. Efrain Serrano serves as the director of engineering at Edwards Lifesciences. Efrain has a broad background of experience and expertise in the DMAIC method, Medical Device development, Root Cause Analysis, and Continuous Improvement, and holds a PhD focused in Engineering Management from Walden University.

 
Efrain Serrano
Edwards Lifesciences
Aaron Moncur, host

 ABOUT BEING AN ENGINEER

The Being an Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.

The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.us

***

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Aaron Moncur and Rafael Testai love hearing from their listeners. Feel free to email us, connect on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and subscribe on Apple Podcast and Spotify!

About Being An Engineer

The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.

The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.us

Jim Wrubel tells us about his path to CTO, his project the Soft Stuff, his experiences with hiring, things new managers need to learn, and moving between independent contributor and managerial tracks.

Times

• Introduction, backstory, rise to CTO
• 15:50 - Hiring
• 28:20 - Stepping away from the code
• 31:00 - Transitioning between leadership levels
• 34:20 - The Engineer/Manager Pendulum
• 38:50 - Learning enough of your tech stack to be helpful and knowledgeable
• 43:55 - Final remarks

Show Notes

• Jim Wrubel's Twitter
• The Soft Stuff
• Beer Goggles
• Megan Callaghan (designer)
• The Engineer/Manager Pendulum

Derek Prior and I take time to chat about how he worked with his team to release the new free private repos at GitHub, our experiences as Engineering Managers, and our love for working remotely.

Show Notes

• Making Work Visible Book