Geeks Who Lead Podcast

Today's 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...

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.

Today's 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...

Today's 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 buildi...

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 ov...

Today's 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...

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 e...

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@mind...

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

Our episode today is from the archives.  Julia Austin is the CTO of DigitalOcean and a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School of Entrepreneurial Management.  Hear about her experiences scaling at rocket ship speed leading DigitalOcean’s engineering and product teams. Find Julia on Twitter at @austinfish and find DigitalOcean at DigitalOcean.com

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 wh...

Anant Jhingran has been in the tech industry for 27 years and has a Ph. D. in Database Systems from Berkeley.  He’s been at IBM, CTO of Apigee, and then after Apigee was acquired, at Google. Apigee manages an API & data layer for various large enterprises.  They look at the data exhaust of those systems and understand patterns so people can improve what they’re doing through the APIs.  Apigee...

Our guest this week is Ian Bernstein , CTO of Sphero .  Sphero is creating a new category of toys called “Connected Toys” that take the best of what kids and adults love about their smart devices and fuse it with our robots that exist in the real world.  Ian’s passion is in electronics and robotics. Ever since he was 12 years old he has been building robots.  Learn about how he parlayed his love o...

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...

Today 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 e...

(BONUS EPISODE FROM THE ARCHIVES) Learn about how Patrick McKenzie combined his technical skills with marketing/sales skills to launch & grow several successful internet businesses. Patrick is the creator of Bingo Card Creator. He learned marketing and sales to launch and grow Kalzumeus Software; He has worked with 37signals, Fog Creek Software, and is now in content & community at Stripe....

We’re joined this week by guest co-host Diana Pfeil to interview Kathy Keating —  Kathy is a Colorado-based Startup CTO who has helped build several successful technology startups, founded her own technology consulting business, guided product strategy for companies and implemented many complex software applications.   Join us for the first episode of StartupCTO.io in 2017 to discuss Kathy’s appro...

This week’s episode is from the archives.  It’s an interview with Jud Valeski.  Jud was a co-founder of Gnip (acquired by Twitter), a real-time data portability software initiative. From client-side consumer-facing products to large scale back-end infrastructure projects, he has enjoyed working with technology for over twenty years. He’s been a part of engineering, product, and M&A teams at IB...

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...

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...

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 wa...

Gevorg was the Co-Founder/CTO of LionSharp, where he led the development of Gesture and Voice controlled systems.  After he left Lionsharp, he became an Agile product/project manager.  Join Gevorg as we chat about collaborative leadership, agile teams and organizations, customer engagement, and delivering business and customer value at breakneck speed.

Manuel Mattke is an innovator, entrepreneur, tech product guy (and from time to time developer), with a background in finance, technology, and innovation consulting.  This week is an extra special episode.   Manuel was Kevin’s CTO mentor at the last startup he founded, and Kevin is super excited to share some of the insights that Manuel shared with him, with all of you. When he’s not mentoring up...

We’re taking this week off; If you’re in the US, you’re celebrating Thanksgiving.  If you’re not in the US, you can still give thanks — Listen to one of our favorite episodes from the archives:  Quantifying Engineering w. Travis Kimmel of Gitprime. Travis Kimmel is the CEO of GitPrime .  GitPrime analyzes a team’s codebase to quantify engineering progress. They make it easy to identify engineers w...

Julia Austin is the CTO of DigitalOcean and a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School of Entrepreneurial Management.  Hear about her experiences scaling at rocket ship speed leading DigitalOcean’s engineering and product teams. Find Julia on Twitter at @austinfish and find DigitalOcean at DigitalOcean.com