CTO Confessions Brought to you by IT Labs

In this episode, we get a glimpse into the industry that makes our everyday lives easier, safer, and flow seamlessly - cybersecurity. Matt Clark, the VP of Technology & Product Development at Smiths Detection, joined us to share his experience as a tech leader. We covered everything - from his beginnings in the industry, all the way to the challenges he thinks we'll face in the foreseeable future,...

In this episode, we talk to Chris Clarke about his journey as the CTO and founder of EdTech company Talis. Having successfully scaled and sold the business, Chris now operates under the umbrella The Scale Up CTO - using his experience, success and mistakes to advise other businesses and startups on their scale up journey. Chris’s journey is one that’s rooted in the essence of technical leadership,...

A fellow podcaster, Ryan Purvis, Chief Information Technology Officer at HiLo Maritime Risk Management, is one of those techies that simply had it in him to lead. From starting out in Johannesburg as a developer, he quickly climbed through the ranks, doing gigs in various industries, before ending up in HiLo. Here, you can hear all about his journey to becoming a tech leader, how he leads, and wha...

Welcome to the start of a special series – in this series, we’ll be talking to techies and tech leaders who have worked at Amazon – the Amazonians – and how it has shaped their futures in the world of IT. And the one hosting this series will be Charles Griffith, CTO at MileZero, a Capstone Company. Each of the individuals that will come on this series will bring their own unique brand of leadershi...

Sustainability – it's the thing we hear more than once every day, in regards to human relationships, the way we work, and how we interact with the world around us and consume products. It all began as we started looking for ways to lower our impact on nature. One of the tech leaders driving us towards a more sustainable future is Ali Bouhouch, CTO & Digital Strategy Executive at SZENTIA, a company...

Worldpay is a service that many of us have used, sometimes knowingly, sometimes through other vendors, but the truth is, it’s everywhere. But how does one company get to this level? We got Usman Bashir, Head of Engineering at Worldpay, down for a chat with our TC Gill, in which he got down to sharing his amazing journey to becoming a tech leader, as well as all the cool and amazing tech he’s into...

The open-source world is a wonderful democracy and meritocracy of innovation, software elements, and applications. Its creativity is incorporated into countless (if not all) major applications across the tech arena. But with it comes complexities. And in this podcast, we get to speak to Brian Fox, the CTO & Co-founder of Sonatype, about those complexities. In particular, the worrying world of secu...

Tech leaders are committed to solving problems that pester man on a daily basis while also focus on improving the livelihoods of people – but what about the ones that have no access to tech? To the internet? To the millions of gigabytes of content on the internet? Enter Andrew McCaughan, CTO at BuffaloGrid. This techie is hell-bent on bridging the gap between developed and emerging economies, by w...

Efficiency starts with leadership, and the best kind of leadership is the one built around the needs and capabilities of your teams. Meet Skyler Seamans and Shane Emmons, the two techies from TeamSnap – a company that provides spots management solutions. What got us really interested into these two and their company is their unique management method they invented, called Shape Up – a mixture of kn...

We have this idea of data that it’s a bulk of information that helps us make decisions in the virtual world, but can it be used for something like renovating buildings and improving the efficiency in the construction world? Enter Japjit Tulsi, the CTO at Matterport, a company which is dedicated to making spatial data a bit more likeable, and the world a bit better. Japjit’s journey is one that’s f...

There’s tons of payment methods and processors out there, but how many of them actually have their focus on transactions that are a make or break for users? Could be many, but one that really stands out is Flywire. And on the doings of this company, we have its CTO, David King, who sat down with our TC Gill to share the story of Flywire, and of course, his own journey in the world of tech. From hi...

Learning, we were taught, was all about having access to material, to content, to courses and all that – and while that’s true, with the ever-increasing availability of study materials now new questions arise – what about the process of learning? And one of the people looking to answer this question is Stepan Suvorov, CTO at Studytube, a company that offers courses to employees of companies, as we...

End-of-life is a challenging time for loved ones. The bereavement process is difficult at the best of times, adding further challenges when the legal and financial questions arise from the event. Well, the guest we have on this podcast is working hard to make this smoother. John Catnach, the CTO of Exizent, is working hard with his team to create a smoother and more efficient process. It reduces t...

In business development and in particular startups, we talk about pivoting whenever the situation has changed or an even better idea has emerged. One that solves a real problem and pain point in the real world. Well, our guest in this episode of CTO Confessions, Eoin O'Brien, tells about a huge pivot that led to a big success. He is the CTO of Tracworx, a company that offers a cloud-hosted Wi-Fi-b...

There are mountain ranges of it! There are oceans of it! Not only do we climb the mountains, but we also swim in it as well. Yes! We are talking about data. And yes, it's an understatement to say there is a bit of it about. To help us tech leaders get clarity on this bonkers situation, we have Arend-Jan Nijhuis, a data expert who joins us on CTO confessions, to share his experience and some tips a...

We are all served by them in these modern times. Those helpful men and women bringing our orders to our homesteads. The complexity of this last logistical mile becomes evident as one scales, and constraints become evident. Expected costs are being driven down, and time to deliver ever smaller. In this episode, we speak to the CTO of Stuart, a company in this space; Lachlan Laycok joins us to celeb...

A techie who started out as a system administrator, and slowly worked his way up the ladder, ending up as the Director of DevOps at TUI Travel Group, the world’s number one holiday business group – Christian Rudolph. We sat down with him in an episode, and he just let us pick his brain as we tried to see what’s really ‘techy’ that’s going on behind the scenes in a big corporation like TUI, as well...

Most tech leaders can be found plying their trade in the private sector, but there are those with big dreams and the willingness to make the world a better place by rolling up their sleeves, and getting down in the mud. Ian Gordon, Head of Data Architecture @ Highway England is just that. This starry-eyed young techie with big dreams and goals understood what it means to provide value for customer...

What started out as a quest to develop a tool for management, tracking progress, and streamlining work processes, turned into a business which is helping other businesses deliver high quality products and improving workflow! The man behind this business? Gerry Sweeney, the Founder & CEO at Hornbill - a techie with a natural affinity for technology who loves automation and solving problems, and a t...

When we think of tech leaders, we usually think of people who knew where they wanted to be in the future, always with a clear picture of the destination, or position, that they were going after. And sometimes it’s like that, but it’s far from a straight line to the top – just ask Adam Leach, Chief Information Officer at Nominet. A techie who let the current drive him around the industry, but who k...

Aside from proficiency in his or her field, a tech leader must also know how to treat people fairly to get the best out of them, but also empower them. As Mike Villalobos, Director of Engineering at Fair.com, shared with us in this episode, a leader must be able to see the furthest, but never forget the valuable input of those around him. “A high-performance team is not just about everyone deliver...

"The intersection of machine learning and real estate - Bringing data science to land investment decisions" It's always interesting to hear from people who have traveled from one field and arrived at a very different one. Well, here is another great example of this. Marios Tsatsos, CTO of Honest AI, once was a scientist in the Quantum mechanics arena and had a doctorate in the field. He now transf...

We here at IT Labs love people who are bees. What we mean by that is people with varied careers bring opportunities for cross-pollination. Cross-pollination of ideas and new ways of doing things. Like bee's these individuals are the backbone of innovation and industry leaps. They play an important part in the industry landscape, buzzing around doing their thing. Simultaneously, creating bridges fo...

Some of the most dynamic and battle-scarred tech leaders are those that have journeyed through a startup journey. In this episode, we get to speak to a tech leader just like that. David Kell, our guest, describes how he left his university degree to start a successful series of startups. In this podcast, we talk about how Gyana's platform. A no-code, data science tool that is democratizing the art...

Erik Dasque joins us for another episode of CTO Confessions, where he shares his intriguing journey of becoming a geek, de-geeking, and geeking up again. He shares his thoughts on the absolute importance of actively designing teams on an ongoing basis. Also, retaining and developing one's skills in the technical space can hugely serve one's tech leadership. Key takeaways from the Podcast are: - Ho...