StartupCTO.io

0.60 — Gitcoin — Grow Open Source w. Kevin Owocki / Changelog

Peter Bell — Thu, 01 Feb 2018 11:49:48 +0000

Today we are posting an interview for The Changelog that StartupCTO.io host Kevin Owocki recently did. From The Changelog:

We’re joined by Kevin Owocki, the founder of Gitcoin. Gitcoin is a platform to monetize or incentivize work in open source software. We talked about how Gitcoin sits at the intersection of sustaining open source and cryptocurrencies, their history and roadmap, their decision to leverage the brand name of Git, bug bounties, funded issues, web3, MetaMask, and the future of Gitcoin and how open source benefits.

[bonus] — Optimize Your Learning Velocity w. Scott Carleton, Andela

Peter Bell — Mon, 01 Jan 2018 12:00:49 +0000

[from the archives] 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 over 6000 creators in 100 countries. His work on Artsicle’s discovery engine, which was able to create a personalized experience for passive users, earned NYER’s “Best Use of Technology” award in 2013.

This episode is for you if you’re into #learning #hiring or #mentorship.

Favorite Quotes

You hear a lot that “its all about the people”, but you don’t really get it until it kicks you in the shins.
I think a lot about communication through a company in the context of dynamic systems and controls. You can have an input of information where someone’s unaligned or there’s some dissonance, and you’re not going to feel the full impact of that until it works it’s way through the organization.
In the early days, I felt like I needed the “best” engineers. That came out as needing Stanford Grads. But what I realized very quickly was that they had very different expectations and needs. I couldnt provide for them the right kinds of challenges because we were still hunting for product market fit.
I’ve found that in hiring I should look for “potential” and not “pedigree”.
We created a culture of really customer focused engineers. The engineers really own their parts of the product. They *really* care about it’s usability.
Friction rises in communication when information doesnt have a place to settle.
Chat is a tool. I’m sold on it. A tool is necessary but not sufficient. You need the tool to be able to create the behaviour you want, but you need a cultural change or a behaviour/belief change to use the tool effectively.
Chat allows us an always on meeting in its worst form. At best, it’s an asyncronous tool to keep everyone in sync.
On chat, my top belief is “Get everything into public channels”
The health of an engineering team is: How many issues are raised and resolved, and how fast is that iteration?
Finding out how to have the right focus for a conversation in a chat channel is important.
When I first started doing 1:1s, I totally didn’t want to do it. I’d make up excuses. Every 1:1, there were engineers who would complain and I just wanted to avoid that. But it turns out 1:1s are invaluable because you’ll always discover something important that you don’t know.
If you’re having problems in your organization, a 1:1 is like taking a knife to that problem and sinking it a little deeper.
When I first joined an organization with an existing engineering team, the first 1:1s were very much “clearing out the backlog” — Figuring out the existing problems.
I have a passion for developing peoples potential.
How do we measure someone’s learning velocity – how quickly they’re picking up new skills?
The killer problem with distributed teams right now is whiteboarding. It’s just *so* hard to do remotely.
Distributed teams are about trust. How do you get the information you need? How do you communicate outward & upward so that we have trust at all times? We need to know we’re all pushing in the same direciton.
Whats really incredible about sotware development is that the people who are building the applications have a lot more information about the problems thye’re solving than you do. You really want most solutions coming from the bottom up.
I focus on how I can expose business problems to the team. I tell them what we’re solving that quarter, and I put retrospectives on the calendar.
Zone of Proximal Development is the Goldilocks Zone for Learning — It isn’t too easy, it’s not too hard.
In learning science, you’re trying to “observations”. If you know a skill, you can observe whether an engineer has certain behaviours and beleifs.
Customer relationships and ownership of your work are really important for engineers.
The height of collaboration is really direct feedback.
The most generous thing you can do is give really good critical feedback.

0.59 – Blockchain is like Sriracha. It’s delicious on everything — Clay Collins & Nick Gauthier of Nomics.com

Peter Bell — Fri, 01 Dec 2017 12:00:30 +0000

Clay Collins & Nick Gauthier are founders of Nomics will be “Yahoo Finance for Crypto” and the internet’s home page for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies.

Nick Gauthier has been developing for the web for 10 years and loves Ruby, Go, and PostgreSQL. You can find him on Twitter at @ngauthier.

Clay Collins is currently CEO/Co-founder of Nomics and Board Chair at Drip/Leadpages. Before co-founding Nomics, Clay founded Leadpages, where he drove growth to over 48K paying customers (and 175 employees), led the company’s acquisition of Drip, and raised $38M in venture capital financing

0.58 – Hire for Vigilance & Excellent Practical Judgement — Quin Hoxie w. Swiftype

Peter Bell — Wed, 01 Nov 2017 12:02:15 +0000

This episode is co-hosted by Jacob Ablowitz. We are honored today to be interviewing Quin Hoxie, founder and CTO of Swiftype. This episode covers Quin’s experiences as an engineer at Scrib, and then as Co-Founder and CTO of Swiftype — The leading platform delivering search solutions for businesses.

Quin’s Bio

Quin Hoxie is the Co-Founder and CTO of Swiftype, the leading search platform for delivering fast, relevant and customizable search results for businesses. After graduating from University of Arizona in 2008 with a B.S. in Computer Science, Quin worked on search at AboutUs before joining Scribd in 2010 to work on their search team. His experiences building the search platform at Scribd led him to start Swiftype with fellow Scribd engineer Matt Riley in 2012. Since graduating from Y Combinator in Winter 2012, Swiftype has become the easiest way to add powerful search to any website or application. With clients ranging from TechCrunch to Hubspot to Qualcomm, Swiftype powers billions of searches every month across the web.

About Swiftype

Founded in 2012, Swiftype’s industry leading search platform delivers relevant and customizable search results for businesses. Swiftype’s suite of products, Site Search and Enterprise Search, have revolutionized the way people find information across their organization and on public facing websites. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company has raised $23 million in funding, by investors including NEA and Y Combinator. Its strong customer portfolio includes AT&T, Shopify, SurveyMonkey, Dr. Pepper, publishers Engadget and TechCrunch, and brands like Qualcomm, Asana, Marketo and Hubspot.

About Jacob Ablowitz

Jacob Ablowitz serves as Co-Founder and CEO of dmi.io, the marketplace for business data. dmi is transforming business decision-making by democratizing access to data-driven insights through connecting sellers and buyers of data while streamlining data discovery, evaluation and contracting.

Jacob has deep experience with the data and technology systems that power the modern information economy. He began his career at Lockheed Martin, working on bleeding-edge ballistic missile defense and submarine sonar systems. At Dealertrack Technologies (now Cox Automotive), Jacob led infrastructure projects underpinning their market-leading car loan application platform. In 2012 he moved on to Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world, in an analytics role, before starting dmi in 2013.

Jacob holds a B.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the University of Colorado and a Master’s in Systems & Information Engineering from the University of Virginia. He is an active member of the Colorado startup community.

0.57 — Sustaining Open Source w. Eric Berry, CodeSponsor.io

Peter Bell — Mon, 23 Oct 2017 12:00:48 +0000

Today, we are honored to have Eric Berry, founder of CodeSponsor.io

Code Sponsor is a matchmaking platform for software developers and open source projects. Code Sponsor enables paying sponsors to get their messages across in front of developers.

In this very special combo episode,

Learn more about the founding story of Code Sponsor and the success they’re seeing in helping Open Source projects become more sustainable.
Learn about the founding of Gitcoin, a project that Kevin founded with a similar goal — pushing open source forward.

If you have an OSS project you’re working on, and a few bucks every day in sponsorships might help, CodeSponsor is there to help. Learn more about Codesponsor at CodeSponsor.io and Eric at @coderberry.

0.56 Blockchain Nerdery w. Matt Walters & Rhys Lindmark

Peter Bell — Sun, 01 Oct 2017 12:00:42 +0000

We are joined this week by Matt Walters (Blockchain Engineer at Consensys, former Techstars CTO), and Rhys Lindmark (Independent Blockchain Engineer) for a very special Blockchain episode of StartupCTO.io.

Join us as we share stories about web3, a hacking story, Blockchain Engineering stories, and to learn about “the human operating system”.

0.55 – The primacy of the network & Web 3.0 — Vince Horn & Ryan Oelke of CryptoMind

Peter Bell — Sun, 03 Sep 2017 12:00:19 +0000

Todays episode is a cross post from Vincent Horn’s new podcast, Crypto-Mind. With permission, I’ve reposted it from Crypto-Mind podcast. This podcast is about contemplating deeply the societal, spiritual, network implications of the networked Web 3.0 world.

This episode is all about networks. Specifically,

What’s it mean to be a part of the network?
Why are networks important?
How do we organize ourselves?
How do we identify ourselves?
What’s it mean to create value and distribute that value?
Which network do I want to put value into?
How much whats happening to cryptocurrency is _just what’s happening in the world_ reflected back into crypto?
The big network is the Life and all life that we know. Making connections there seems really important.
Is it ethical to run a bitcoin node in a world where there is climate change. Is POS a moral eventuality?
How a simple Google bus is analogy for new world and a lightning rod for some.
Taking the model of the king and democratizing it some. If you are a good entrepreneur you are king. You have followers . Take that model and took it apart so everyone can be king in their own way.
Rise of mindfulness when attention becomes a constraint.

Subscribe to the Crypto-Mind podcast here.

0.54 — The Ethereum Ecosystem w. Raine Revere, Lead Architect at Prism

Peter Bell — Fri, 01 Sep 2017 12:00:37 +0000

Raine Revere is the Lead Architect at Prism — The world’s first trustless portfolio market platform.

Join Raine and special guest co-host Kevin Seagraves as we discuss blockchain, ethereum, and the future of Web3.

0.53 – Ch-ch-changes (Announcements)

Peter Bell — Thu, 03 Aug 2017 12:00:50 +0000

Miles & Kevin announce some changes to the podcast:

Miles will be winding down his involvement in the podcast.
The show will be once a month (instead of once a week).
We’ll ramp up our ‘Emerging Tech’ series, focused initially on VR, AR, Blockchain, Machine Learning, Internet of Things, and Cryptography.
Interested in guest co-hosting? Recommend a speaker, and let’s chat.

[bonus] — People First Organizations w. Dave Zwieback

Peter Bell — Thu, 27 Jul 2017 12:00:11 +0000

[from the archives]

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@mindweather.com. You’ll learn the theory and, most important, get to practice conducting Learning Reviews, a critical new practice for building resilient, people-first learning organizations.

This episode is for you if you’re interested in learning about: soft-skills, career, or management.

0.52 — Bootstrapped Developers

Peter Bell — Thu, 20 Jul 2017 12:00:48 +0000

So you can build it… but, do you know what to do once it’s built? How to monetize it? How do you make enough money to live off of while your company takes off? In this episode, learn about how to go beyond your raw skills of building anything you want and learn what it takes to create a thriving business.

Speakers:
– Mike AbiEzzi
– Alison Hughes
– Dan Moore
– Brian Ponterelli

0.51 — How to CTO w. Kathy Keating

Peter Bell — Thu, 13 Jul 2017 12:00:16 +0000

Our Boulder Startup Week episode streak continues. Today, we’ve got Kathy Keating, CTO of Apostrophe on the show.

Kathy has helped build several successful technology startups, founded her own technology consulting business, guided product strategy for companies, and implemented more highly complex software applications than she can count. She has a knack for building diverse technology teams, successful agile business practices, and mentoring the leaders of tomorrow.

Previously Kathy was VP of Engineering at Autopay, founded Tricalyx, and was VP of Product Strategic Systems at Monster.

0.50 — How to CTO w. Ed Johnson

Peter Bell — Thu, 06 Jul 2017 12:00:32 +0000

Our Boulder Startup Week episode streak continues. Today, we’ve got Ed Johnson, CTO of Goally on the show.

Ed and his co-founders at Goally are on a mission to help parents build their children’s independence and self-confidence, while giving those parents a break from emotionally-draining and endless reminders. All while freeing kids from always feeling “bossed around”. They aim to meaningfully reduce anxiety and stress in millions of family homes, with an early focus on children with autism, ADHD and Down Syndrome.

Prior to working at Goally, Ed was a Director of Engineering at Qualcomm where he created and led a global team working on 4G LTE.

——————————————————————————————————-

This week’s episode is sponsored by GitPrime.

Subjective measures like story points and tickets only tell part of the story of software development. GitPrime gives engineering managers the full picture with metrics in context on team productivity. So you can spot risk, identify waste, move faster, and advocate for your team with hard data instead of a narrative. Stop flying blind — and start leading engineering with concrete data.

More at gitprime.com

0.49 — How to CTO w. Nick Cheever

Peter Bell — Thu, 29 Jun 2017 12:00:16 +0000

Our Boulder Startup Week episode streak continues. Today, we’ve got Nick Cheever, VP of Technology at 10-4 on the show.

Nick has over 15 years of experience in product development, particularly in a technical leadership role. He has been the lead for multiple SaaS-based platforms and has a proven track record of executing intuitive and technically-savvy solutions. Currently Nick oversees the devops, product, creative, and development groups at 10-4 systems as they disrupt the transportation industry by providing big data logistical solutions.

——————————————————————————————————-

This week’s episode is sponsored by GitPrime.

More at gitprime.com

0.48 — Boulder Startup Week 2017 Dev War Stories

Peter Bell — Thu, 22 Jun 2017 12:00:58 +0000

Hi and welcome to a very special Boulder Startup Week episode.

This week we’ve got some stories from a session entitled “Dev War Stories”. If you’re a longtime listener, you know that this is one of our favorite questions to ask interviewees.

There are 3 speakers giving war stories in this episode.

The first is Ed Johnson, CTO of Goally
The second is Jason Cole, CTO of a few startups around town.
The third is Greg Lems, CTO at Door to Door Organics.

One last thing. If you hear a flashlight turning on and off, its because miles set up the session to have the lights down low, kind of like a campfire ghost story type of atmosphere.

Enjoy yall!

0.47 — How to CTO with Andy Pai, Full Contact

Peter Bell — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 12:00:23 +0000

This week’s guest is Andy Pai, VP Engineering at FullContact. FullContact is the most powerful, fully-connected contact management platform for professionals and enterprises who need to master their contacts and be awesome with people. As VP of Engineering, Andy is focused on growing the engineering organization, and building a secure, private and scalable data platform. Previously, Andy has helped build several data-oriented startups as CTO. He’s passionate about scaling platforms, driving organizational change, maximizing team effectiveness and helping people reach their potential.

0.46 — AI, Automation, Jobs & The Economy w. Jeff Rose of ThinkTopic

Peter Bell — Thu, 08 Jun 2017 12:00:10 +0000

Jeff Rose presenting in a very special Boulder Startup Week 2017 talk. Artificial intelligence is undergoing a renaissance, with the number of relevant research papers, startups, applications, and new ideas expanding rapidly. These new capabilities will enable people and result in greater aggregate productivity, analogous to the invention of the steam engine that powered the industrial revolution. At the same time many laborers, drivers, assembly line workers, and even some more skilled roles in society will be made redundant. This shift will have both positive and negative consequences for individuals’ lives, society, and the economy, which is why it is important to start understanding the trends and preparing now.

Join Jeff Rose, CEO of Boulder AI company ThinkTopic, to discuss the technology, economic and political landscape of our automated future.

0.45 — Programmable Money w. Piper Merriam

Peter Bell — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 12:00:11 +0000

Cryptocurrencies have the potential to be TCP/IP of money. What does the future look like if they do to money, what the internet did for information? Learn about Ethereum, one of the top cryptocurrencies of 2017. Piper Merriam, Ethereum developer, presenting at Boulder Startup Week.

Video of this talk available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPoaMC1qNFY and embedded below:

0.44 — Crypto and the Law with EFA Colorado

Peter Bell — Thu, 25 May 2017 12:00:02 +0000

EFA Colorado presenting in a very special Boulder Startup Week 2017 talk. What is Cryptography, and why does it matter? What is the history of cryptography, and where is it going in the future? Join this joint presentation of the Future of Tech + Legal tracks at Boulder Startup Week to learn more about the civil rights battles of the 21st century.

Video of this talk is posted at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RN0F2CmXPU and embeded below:

[bonus] Understanding People is a Superpower; @rands, VP Engineering at Slack

Peter Bell — Thu, 18 May 2017 12:00:32 +0000

Todays episode is from the archives. 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 where he’s furiously working on helping teams reinvent work.

Michael has written two books. His first book “Managing Humans, 3rd Edition” is a popular guide to the art of engineering leadership and clearly explains that while you be rewarded for what you build, you will only be successful because of your people. His second book “Being Geek” is a career handbook for geeks and nerds alike.

Michael plays hockey, mountain bikes, tinkers with drones, and drinks red wine in the redwoods of Northern California whenever he can because staying sane is more important than staying busy.

Favorite Quotes:

[bonus] Engineering Values Roundup

Peter Bell — Thu, 11 May 2017 12:00:47 +0000

Todays episode is from the archives.

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
Travis Kimmel — CEO of GitPrime
Julia Austin — CTO of Digital Ocean
Manuel Mattke — Chief Innovation Officer at Opportunity Education
Maria Gutierrez & Glenn Vanderburg — Maria is VP Engineering at FreeAgent and Glen is VP Engineering at First.

[bonus] Great Engineering War Stories

Peter Bell — Thu, 04 May 2017 12:00:46 +0000

Todays 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 a guy in the garage with a product” to a war story from a large venture scaled startup.

In order of appearance:

Patrick McKenzie – independent software developer
1. Story misplacing your pager and being unaware of your outage
Travis Kimmel – CEO of GitPrime
1. Story about after launch the dance of cleaning up your early assumptions and building new features
Jay Zeschin, Lead Architect at ello
1. Story of “blowing up”, getting tens of thousands of users, and VC funding all at once.
Jud Valeski – CTO at GNIP, acquired by twitter
1. Story about screening your customers for success

Enjoy!

0.43 — Your Startup is a Pirate Ship w. Jack Dietrich & Ryan VanMiddlesworth

Peter Bell — Thu, 27 Apr 2017 12:00:56 +0000

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.

[bonus] Advancing Your Career is like Playing Great Chess w. Chris McAvoy

Peter Bell — Thu, 20 Apr 2017 12:00:31 +0000

Todays 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 a technology leader with a passion for open source communities, innovative products, software and architecture. He is presently a mentor at Techstars and the VP Engineering at Cognizant QuickLeft.

[bonus] Reinventing the Organization w. Dan Kador, CTO of Keen.io

Peter Bell — Thu, 13 Apr 2017 12:00:35 +0000

Todays 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 building a different type of organization — with a team that’s got the autonomy, purpose, and tools they need to deliver great analytics software.
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0.42 — Optimize Your Learning Velocity w. Scott Carleton, Andela

Peter Bell — Thu, 06 Apr 2017 12:00:49 +0000

Our guest today is Scott Carleton.

This episode is for you if you’re into #learning #hiring or #mentorship.

Favorite Quotes

You hear a lot that “its all about the people”, but you don’t really get it until it kicks you in the shins.
I think a lot about communication through a company in the context of dynamic systems and controls. You can have an input of information where someone’s unaligned or there’s some dissonance, and you’re not going to feel the full impact of that until it works it’s way through the organization.
In the early days, I felt like I needed the “best” engineers. That came out as needing Stanford Grads. But what I realized very quickly was that they had very different expectations and needs. I couldnt provide for them the right kinds of challenges because we were still hunting for product market fit.
I’ve found that in hiring I should look for “potential” and not “pedigree”.
We created a culture of really customer focused engineers. The engineers really own their parts of the product. They *really* care about it’s usability.
Friction rises in communication when information doesnt have a place to settle.
Chat is a tool. I’m sold on it. A tool is necessary but not sufficient. You need the tool to be able to create the behaviour you want, but you need a cultural change or a behaviour/belief change to use the tool effectively.
Chat allows us an always on meeting in its worst form. At best, it’s an asyncronous tool to keep everyone in sync.
On chat, my top belief is “Get everything into public channels”
The health of an engineering team is: How many issues are raised and resolved, and how fast is that iteration?
Finding out how to have the right focus for a conversation in a chat channel is important.
When I first started doing 1:1s, I totally didn’t want to do it. I’d make up excuses. Every 1:1, there were engineers who would complain and I just wanted to avoid that. But it turns out 1:1s are invaluable because you’ll always discover something important that you don’t know.
If you’re having problems in your organization, a 1:1 is like taking a knife to that problem and sinking it a little deeper.
When I first joined an organization with an existing engineering team, the first 1:1s were very much “clearing out the backlog” — Figuring out the existing problems.
I have a passion for developing peoples potential.
How do we measure someone’s learning velocity – how quickly they’re picking up new skills?
The killer problem with distributed teams right now is whiteboarding. It’s just *so* hard to do remotely.
Distributed teams are about trust. How do you get the information you need? How do you communicate outward & upward so that we have trust at all times? We need to know we’re all pushing in the same direciton.
Whats really incredible about sotware development is that the people who are building the applications have a lot more information about the problems thye’re solving than you do. You really want most solutions coming from the bottom up.
I focus on how I can expose business problems to the team. I tell them what we’re solving that quarter, and I put retrospectives on the calendar.
Zone of Proximal Development is the Goldilocks Zone for Learning — It isn’t too easy, it’s not too hard.
In learning science, you’re trying to “observations”. If you know a skill, you can observe whether an engineer has certain behaviours and beleifs.
Customer relationships and ownership of your work are really important for engineers.
The height of collaboration is really direct feedback.
The most generous thing you can do is give really good critical feedback.

[bonus] Building for Massive Scale w. Tim Jenkins, CTO of SendGrid

Peter Bell — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 12:00:06 +0000

Todays 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 story of one of the most successful email deliverability providers on the web, take a journey through the ebb & flow of a CTO’s responsibilities as a company scales massively, and learn about how SendGrid’s culture has been defined by the 4 H’s: honest, hungry, humble, and happy.
Continue Reading

0.41 — Find A Niche and be The Best w. Courtland Allen of IndieHackers.com

Peter Bell — Thu, 23 Mar 2017 12:00:59 +0000

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 ever since graduating from school.
The idea behind Indie Hackers is that it’s completely transparent. Everyone shares their revenue. They share their strategies for growing and marketing their business. We built community through transparency.
You can go on Techcrunch and you can hear about the Snapchats or Uberes of the world. But you can’t learn about Joe the Hacker who is running a $2k/ month business.
The cultures could not be more different (bootstrapped vs VC backed).
Instead of worrying about raising money from VCs and building a billion dollar company, you could instead focus on your product and solving for a need that your customers will pay money for.
A lot of startup founders don’t achieve their goals because the bar is set so astronomically high. In a VC funded startup, sometimes if you don’t reach that goal, your expected value goes to zero.
Indie Hackers community has a lot of people who are making $1k or $2k/mo per side project while working a full time job. That’s basically like giving themselves a raise.
I wish more people knew you didn’t have to do this crazy all or nothing thing.
The tech press is incentivized by what gets the most eyeballs, which is inevitably going to be the craziest most flashy stories with the biggest numbers possible. The unicorns is what they call them now. This venture capital narrative is fed to everybody.
There’s binary outcomes with VC funded companies. They tend to either fail spectacularly or succeed spectacularly. They give you advice and resources that push you to those binary outcomes. I wish people were aware you could build businesses in more of a traditional way, getting revenue from day 1.
Having all of our interviews be transparent was an important value from the start. I wasn’t going to publish any interviews where the founder wasn’t going to be transparent about how they build the business. I was building Indie Hackers for myself, thinking of the time in which I was trying to build a side business myself.
I get inspired by putting myself in the interviewees shoes and seeing the kind of decisions they made to get to where they are.
If you want to start a company, start a company in an area you’re interested in or want to learn about. I need to read books, I need to learn about business, marketing, growth, if I want to be able to curate good interviews.
‘I’m a developer, I’m pretty confident in my programing skills. I’m not a great writer, or marketer, or salesperson.’ But what people don’t realize is that you just need to know the basics. Learning how to code is a lot harder than learning how to do a lot of these skills at a passable level.
One of the things I’ve learned about Marketing is the importance of targeting a niche: A specific group of people who share qualities and characteristics who ideally will use your product.
If you target a small specific group of people that you have almost no competition. You can build features that only they care about.
A niche isn’t a group of features your product has. You need to describe an actual existent group of people.
Having a monopoly is important. Whatever target market you’re targeting, you want your audience to look at you as the best possible solution to their problems. Is the market I’m in super humongous? No, there’s not billions of people in it. It makes sense to position itself as the one place you can get one specific thing first, then expanding into other markets.
I think virtual reality is super cool. Maybe this time around we won’t hit on VR that works for the masses — portable and affordable, doesnt get us sick. In the long run, it’s some percentage as good as the matrix. Its the final frontier for bits taking over the world from Atoms.
AI is pretty cool. What I think is cool about it is not that it’s going to replace what people do, but in many cases it’ll augment what people do. It’ll work alongside them in a way that allows new business models to exist.
There are a lot developers on Indie Hackers. One of the things you get as engineer is a ton of focus on what it means to be good engineer. It’s very difficult when you tranasition to being an entrepreneur it’s very difficult to draw a line in the sand and say “OK some of this old advice I got only applied to Engineers as a profession”. When you are a founder and have a business you have to worry about customers, learning from your customers, increasing sales, setting prices, building a sticky product. You can’t focus as much as you could before on engineering best practices. I’ve seen a lot of people build products that followed the best engineering principles; extremely well tested and reliable, but make $0.
You can’t be a perfectionist engineer if you’re going to be an entrepreneur (unless you’re building a library for other engineers). You need to focus on the entire business, and bring yourself to not obsess over trivial technical details of your product.
Be flexible, don’t be tied to using the latest greatest technology.
It’s OK to massively screw up. Almost every startup I’ve worked for has massively screwed up.
Reading is tremendous. It helps you encounter problems others have had without having to go through that pain first. But nothing quite sticks like actually having experienced something.
If you’re hesitating to do anything, whether it’s launching your own website or starting your own business, there’s no better way to learn than do it and fail. Be forgiving with yourself and realize that failure is likely but you’ll learn a lot.
You need to be patient as much as you are ambitious.

0.40 — People First Organizations w. Dave Zwieback

Peter Bell — Thu, 16 Mar 2017 12:00:44 +0000

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.

This episode is for you if you’re interested in learning about: soft-skills, career, or management.

0.39 – Mission Driven Tech w. Zack Bomsta, Owlet

Peter Bell — Thu, 09 Mar 2017 13:00:13 +0000

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

[bonus] Scaling the Rocket Ship w. Julia Austin of DigitalOcean

Peter Bell — Thu, 02 Mar 2017 12:00:04 +0000

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

0.38 – Understanding People is a Superpower; @rands, VP Engineering at Slack

Peter Bell — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 14:00:54 +0000

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 where he’s furiously working on helping teams reinvent work.

Michael plays hockey, mountain bikes, tinkers with drones, and drinks red wine in the redwoods of Northern California whenever he can because staying sane is more important than staying busy.

Favorite Quotes:

0.37 – From Startup CTO to Acquired by Google — Anant Jhingran, CTO @Apigee

Peter Bell — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 14:00:56 +0000

Anant Jhingran has been in the tech industry for 27 years, and has a PhD 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 was recently acquired by Google, and Anant is working on integrating their technologies into Google’s infrastructure.
Continue Reading

0.36 – From Zero to Sphero w. Ian Bernstein, CTO @Sphero

Peter Bell — Thu, 09 Feb 2017 10:00:14 +0000

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 of robotics into one of the most successful robotics company in the country. Sphero is a robotic ball that can be controlled with a smartphone. The company also makes the BB-8 toy robot featured prominently in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

0.35 – Reinventing the Organization w. Dan Kador, CTO of Keen.io

Peter Bell — Thu, 02 Feb 2017 12:00:33 +0000

0.34 — Building for Massive Scale w. Tim Jenkins, CTO of SendGrid

Peter Bell — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 12:00:05 +0000

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.

[bonus] – Cross-Training with Sales & Marketing ft. @patio11

Peter Bell — Thu, 19 Jan 2017 14:00:55 +0000

(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.

Find Patrick on twitter at @patio11 and listen to Patrick’s podcast here.

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0.33 – Bend the Learning Curve by Consistently Putting Yourself into a Place You’re Uncomfortable — Kathy Keating

Peter Bell — Thu, 12 Jan 2017 14:00:12 +0000

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 approach to building a startup from the ground up, data & analytics, being involved in the community, mentorship, and creating great software teams.
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[Bonus] – Hire Engineers that are Smarter Than You Are w. Jud Valeski

Peter Bell — Thu, 05 Jan 2017 14:00:41 +0000

(review this episode on iTunes)

This week’s episode is from the archives. It’s an interview with Jud Valeski. Jud was 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 IBM, Netscape, onebox.com, and AOL. He has played a central role in the release of a wide range of products used by tens of millions of users worldwide.

Find Jud on twitter at @jvaleski and at http://one.valeski.org/.

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0.32 — Engineering Values Roundup

Peter Bell — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 14:00:52 +0000

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
Travis Kimmel — CEO of GitPrime
Julia Austin — CTO of Digital Ocean
Manuel Mattke — Chief Innovation Officer at Opportunity Education
Maria Gutierrez & Glenn Vanderburg — Maria is VP Engineering at FreeAgent and Glen is VP Engineering at First.

0.31 – Advancing Your Career is like Playing Great Chess w. Chris McAvoy

Peter Bell — Thu, 22 Dec 2016 13:00:44 +0000

0.30 – Great Engineering War Stories

Peter Bell — Thu, 15 Dec 2016 14:00:59 +0000

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 war story from a large venture scaled startup.

In order of appearance:

Patrick McKenzie – independent software developer
1. Story misplacing your pager and being unaware of your outage
Travis Kimmel – CEO of GitPrime
1. Story about after launch the dance of cleaning up your early assumptions and building new features
Jay Zeschin, Lead Architect at ello
1. Story of “blowing up”, getting tens of thousands of users, and VC funding all at once.
Jud Valeski – CTO at GNIP, acquired by twitter
1. Story about screening your customers for success

Enjoy!

0.29 – Building Successful Distributed Teams – Gevorg Hovsepyan

Peter Bell — Thu, 08 Dec 2016 13:00:38 +0000

Gevorg was the Co-Founder/CTO of LionSharp, where he led 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.
Continue Reading

0.28 — Rethinking Education from First Principles w. Manuel Mattke

Peter Bell — Thu, 01 Dec 2016 14:00:13 +0000

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 & coming CTO’s, Manuel is building his own startups. He has founded and built several startups, including an enterprise software company, a mobile app company and an innovation consulting firm, and likes to focus on combining business strategy, innovation and design thinking, and technology products.

Manuel is currently designing and implementing relevant & engaging learning experiences for teens in the US and in the developing world. Education models around the world have seen limited innovation over the last 50+ years, and are ripe for significant new efforts. Learn about Manuel’s work as Chief Innovation Officer disrupting education at Opportunity Education in this week’s episode.

[bonus] Quantifying Engineering w. Travis Kimmel of Gitprime

Peter Bell — Thu, 24 Nov 2016 14:00:37 +0000

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 who are stuck or bogged down with refactoring, and quantify the amount of effort spent paying down technical debt.

Find Travis on twitter at @traviskimmel.

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0.27 Scaling the Rocket Ship w. Julia Austin of DigitalOcean

Peter Bell — Thu, 17 Nov 2016 14:00:56 +0000

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

0.26 Web Security for Startup CTOs w. Andrew Useckas

Peter Bell — Thu, 10 Nov 2016 13:42:14 +0000

Andrew Useckas is the CTO of Threat-X; a 10 person startup based out of Colorado that provides Web Application Firewalls as a Service. Join Andrew as we discuss the most relevant threats to software startup companies today and we learn how he and his team built a next-gen security company.

Find Andrew on twitter at https://twitter.com/daronin and Threat-X at https://threat-x.com/

Favorite Quotes:

An engineer has to be a self starter. I look for someone who can really take initiative; someone who can take a project and make it their own

A quality I look for in hires is ability to pivot as necessary. What tool you use depends upon the task. Things always improve and you have to be flexible.

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0.25 Building Teams that create Customer Success w. Ingrid Alongi

Peter Bell — Thu, 03 Nov 2016 14:18:24 +0000

Ingrid Alongi is the co-founder of Quickleft, a software development firm in Boulder Colorado which was acquired by Cognizant in March of 2016. In this episode, Ingrid takes us through the founding story of QuickLeft, and how QuickLeft used Net Promoter Scores to drive great outcomes for end-customers.

Find Ingrid on Twitter at @electromute and check out QuickLeft at QuickLeft.com.

Favorite Quotes:

My biggest engineering value is pragmatism and collaboration. Things get done better when you work as a team. The best solution is the one that launches.

Its really important to be able to communicate ideas, and to sell your ideas; even if the client is not technical. We invest in speaking at conferences and blog posts a lot.

If people write software on time and clients are happy, then that’s a success. It doesn’t matter as much if the code they write is poetry.

I’ve seen the ebb and flow of people wanting more structure and then less structure. Organizations today are much flatter than they used to be.

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[bonus] ZCash ($ZEC) – A blockchain for Privacy with Zooko Wilcox

Peter Bell — Fri, 28 Oct 2016 14:00:15 +0000

We’ve got a special bonus episode for ya’ll this week.

Episode 0.8 of our Podcast was a Boulder Startup Week talk about ZCash by it’s founder; Zooko Wilcox. ZCash is a privacy centric blockchain. Zcash payments are published on a public blockchain, but the sender, recipient, and amount of a transaction remain private.

A lot of people are really excited about a blockchain that enables truly anonymous transactions on the web, and believe that ZCash could be a top 5 blockchain within a year. ZCash has an all star roster of cryptographers; and they today in version 1.0.0; So I’m reposting our ZCash episode, episode 0.8.

0.24 – Crossing the Chasm w. Brandon Purcell

Peter Bell — Thu, 27 Oct 2016 13:00:47 +0000

Brandon Purcell is the CTO of SpatialKey; a leading geospatial intelligence analytics platform. SpatialKey started as a proof of concept prototype in 2007 and has grown into a full fledged profitable business over the last seven years. Listen to this episode to hear SpatialKey’s founding journey; from finding a core customer who was willing to pay for their product, to growing into a SAAS provider serving several prominent paying customers.

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