The CTO Podcast

It's no small feat to go from the second developer in a company to its CTO, but one man who is up to the task is Jesus Lizama of Studio 3. Jesus is joining the CTO Studio to talk about his career progression, as well as what it's been like to live here as a DACA recipient. Jesus is an engineer who has become CTO of Studio 3, a rapidly growing agency. In fact, his agency is growing so fast they are...

If you were considering joining a start-up as their CTO would you have a formula to evaluate its potential? Our guest on today’s CTO Studio does and it stems from his years as a CTO, an advisor and mentor in the field. Sergey Sundukovskiy is the CTO, CPO, co-founder of Raken. He's also a mentor, advisor and father of three.  Sergey and I have a great conversation about the formula for evaluating s...

Have you ever found yourself working on a side project because you thought you had to and not because you wanted to? Our guest for this episode of CTO Studio has and he also found out why it’s okay not to finish that side project. Evan Phoenix is the lead engineer on the private Terraform enterprise  at Hashi Corp, and the Director of Ruby Central. He’s also been a CEO of a start up and regularly...

There’s a lot happening in the world of cloud services today and Jonathan LaCour of Mission is here to tell us all about it. Jonathan is CTO of Mission, a managed cloud consulting service based in Los Angeles. On today’s episode of CTO Studio, Jonathan and I talk about all the issues related to cloud and cloud migration and owning your own data. Be sure to listen in to this fascinating conversatio...

Joining us to explain how CTOs can best utilize recruiters is my friend and expert recruiter Kimberly Owen. Kimberly has been a recruiter for 23 years, starting in London then Silicon Valley during the first dotcom boom. Now she is based in southern California. On today's CTO Studio, we talk about what she's learned during those two decades as a recruiter in tech including why recruiters have a ba...

Who better to help us understand the psychology of people in tech than a former engineer now licensed psychologist?! Joanie Connell is that very person and she is here to talk about the issues CTOs face in leading their teams. Joanie works with dev teams and technical teams on their communication. We talk about how she does that, what some of the common issues are regarding team communication in t...

What does it take to be successful and have longevity as a a CTO in healthcare tech today? In Larry Heminger’s case it takes optimism. Larry is the CTO of Sapiens Data Science, a company committed to increasing people’s life span through healthcare tech breakthroughs.   On today’s CTO Studio, we talk about how and why Larry joined the team at Sapiens, why he’s attracted to companies that are makin...

What is it like to handle both hardware and software development needs? Anh Nguyen is a hybrid CTO of hardware and software and she’s here tell us all about it. Anh is the CTO of Creative Electron where they build imaging systems that use creative electrons for the purpose of inspecting samples for defects. On today’s show she’ll explain how their equipment works, what she thinks about the state o...

If you saw a need or an opportunity outside of your industry would you recognize it? Our guest did and he’s here to tell us about it. Alan Leard is one of the co-founders of Limelight Health, a quoting, underwriting, proposal platform that started as an idea for an app.  You'll hear the origin story of Limelight Health today as well as how it has evolved, plus Alan's thoughts on having four co-fou...