alphalist.CTO Podcast - For CTOs and Technical Leaders
This podcast features interviews with CTOs and technical leaders, covering topics like AI, blockchain, DevOps, and management. Guests from leading tech companies share best practices and insights to support other CTOs in their journey.
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#144 Writing Code Is No Longer the Job: Dana Lawson on Trusting AI Agents Like Self-Driving Cars // CTO @ Netlify
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Dana Lawson's path into tech started with backup tapes, not a keyboard-in-the-womb origin story. She joined the US Army in the late '90s, automated her wa
#143 The Company Brain: How Kombo Runs on a Git Repo and a Cursor Agent — with Aike Hillbrands, Co-Founder & CTO @ Kombo
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Aike Hillbrands co-founded and killed two companies before Kombo, now a Y Combinator-backed HR integration platform with $10M+ ARR and a $25M Series A. Al
#142 Why LLMs Need Their Own Programming Language: From Assembly to AI with Vaibhav Gupta // Co-founder @ BAML
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Vaibhav Gupta built computer vision for the original Microsoft HoloLens, optimized AR at Google, and wrote high-performance assem
#141 AI Pat Works Here Now: Why Agents Must Follow Human Rules with Pat Casey // CTO @ ServiceNow
Pat Casey was the first person besides founder Fred Luddy to write code at ServiceNow back in 2005, when it was called Glide and lived above a friend's restaurant. Twenty years later, he's CTO of a company where 85% of the Fortune 500 are customers, and until recently ran all of engineering: 10,000 people, 7,000 of them writing code. Almost nobody survives the journey from first engineer to public
#140 From Stripe's Fifth Engineer to Serving Millions of Developers with Anurag Goel // Founder & CEO @ Render Goel
Before he founded Render, Anurag Goel was the fifth engineer at Stripe, where he watched roughly a fifth of the engineering team disappear into managing AWS, writing brittle, repetitive, error-prone infrastructure scripts that had nothing to do with the actual product. That experience became the seed for Render: a platform that automates away the undifferentiated DevOps work and lets application t
#139 Your Future Job Is a Decision Inbox — Max Deichmann Built the Layer That Gets You There // Co-Founder @ Langfuse
Max Deichmann is the co-founder of Langfuse, the open-source LLM engineering platform that became the observability layer of choice for teams building production AI agents, before being acquired by ClickHouse. He started as a business student who taught himself to code via CS50 on a beach in Singapore, pivoted through Y Combinator, fired his own customers mid-batch, and built Langfuse out of a Su
#138 From Hacker News to W3C: How One Amazon Engineer Accidentally Shaped the Future of AI Browsers // Alex Nahas, MCP-B
Alex Nahas is 28 years old and has already initiated a W3C web standard. Working as a backend engineer at Amazon, he ran into a problem most enterprises face: MCP requires OAuth, but most enterprise infrastructure runs on SAML. His solution was elegant: run the MCP server in client-side JavaScript, letting AI agents use the browser's existing authentication context rather than rebuilding auth from
#137 - Only Three Search Engines Left Standing: One of Them Powers Your AI with JP Schmetz // Chief of Ads @ Brave
Most people assume the web runs on Google. The reality is more concentrated: only three companies on earth operate truly independent search indices — Google, Bing, and Brave. Jean-Paul Schmetz helped build one of them.
In this episode, Jean-Paul traces the arc from writing appointment software in a Belgian Radio Shack in 1981, through founding and selling Clix — a European search engine backed by
#136 - AI Writes Code: Who Architects the Consequences? with Neal Ford // Software Architect & Author
Neal Ford: software architect, author, speaker, and independent consultant (formerly 20+ years at ThoughtWorks), joins Tobias to explore what happens to software architecture when AI agents write the code.
We unpack the critical distinction between behavior and capabilities: why everyone focuses on what code does, but too few think about scalability, security, and responsiveness. Neal introduce
#135 - From Legacy to Innovation: Yahoo's Modernization & AI with Lee Zen // CTO @ Yahoo
Lee Zen, CTO of Yahoo, joins Tobias to unpack what it takes to modernize one of the internet’s most iconic consumer portfolios—Mail, Finance, Sports, News, and Search—while operating with real legacy constraints at massive scale.
We talk about Yahoo’s evolution from its public days to private equity ownership, how modernization actually happens (cloud, platform bets, experimentation), and why shi
#134 - From Inner to Outer Loop: Agentic Coding, Stacking PRs, and the Cursor Merger with Greg Foster // CTO @ Graphite
Greg Foster, Co-founder and CTO of Graphite (recently acquired by Cursor), joins the podcast to discuss the massive shift occurring in software engineering: the move from maximizing "Inner Loop" speed (writing code) to solving "Outer Loop" bottlenecks (reviewing, testing, merging).
With AI generating code faster than humans can review it, the traditional Pull Request model is under pressure. Greg
#133 - Build the Learning Machine: AI Adoption, Flow Metrics, and the Future of the CTO Role with Eric Bowman
Eric Bowman (CTO @ King.com, previously CTO at TomTom and VP Engineering at Zalando) returns to the alphalist podcast to unpack what “agentic engineering” really means in practice—and how to introduce it to teams without turning it into a mandate.
We talk about the uncomfortable trade-offs behind “YOLO mode” tooling, why adoption should feel voluntary even when you set explicit goals (like “five
#132 - Clarity Over Tooling: Velocity & Building Teams Without Drama with Loïc Houssier // CTO @ Superhuman Mail
What drives execution velocity—better tools or better clarity? Loïc Houssier, CTO of Superhuman Mail (post-Grammarly acquisition), argues that most velocity problems stem from unclear team missions, not inadequate tooling. From steering DocuSign's French acquisition through complex carve-out negotiations to building Superhuman's offline-first architecture with a 100-millisecond interaction rule, L
#131 - AI Product Strategy: When to Build and When to Wait with Matthias Keller // CPO @ Kayak
Matthias Keller, Chief Product Officer at Kayak, shares hard-won lessons about AI product strategy and knowing when to invest in emerging platforms. With a PhD in computer engineering from ETH Zurich and 12 years at Kayak, Matthias has lived through multiple waves of AI hype—from Alexa voice skills in 2016 to today's LLM revolution. He discusses the strategic calculus of early platform bets, the p
#130 - From PhD Research to DuckDB: Building the Next Generation of Analytical DBs with Mark Raasveldt // CTO @ DuckDB
Mark Raasveldt, co-founder and CTO of DuckDB Labs, shares his journey from academic research at CWI Amsterdam to creating one of the most innovative analytical databases of the last decade. Mark discusses the technical challenges of building DuckDB from scratch, the philosophy behind embedded analytical databases, and why single-node performance still matters in our cloud-first world. He provides
#129 - $32B Lessons: Building CTO Teams, Rapid Innovation, and Staying Customer-Connected with Solal Raveh
What does it take to build a company worth $32 billion? Solal Raveh, CTO Product Infrastructure at Wiz, shares hard-won lessons from scaling technical teams during one of the fastest-growing security companies in history. Learn how Wiz evolved their CTO office from traditional team building to rapid innovation incubation, why geographic team cloning failed spectacularly, and how staying customer-c
#128 - From Tickets to Problems: Klaus Breyer // Head of Product & Technology @ Edding
You know how agile transformations always promise better collaboration but somehow teams end up chasing tickets like a factory assembly line? Klaus Breyer from Edding has some thoughts on why this keeps happening—and what actually works instead.
Klaus's path to leading product and technology at Germany's most famous pen company wasn't exactly traditional. Before Edding, he spent years managing 40
#127 - Kelsey Hightower's Unfiltered Truths: 25 Years of Infrastructure, DevOps, and Retiring at 42
What happens when a distinguished engineer who shaped the cloud-native landscape decides to retire at 42? Kelsey Hightower, a pivotal figure in the Kubernetes community and former Google engineer, shares brutally honest insights from his 25-year journey. This isn't a conversation about the next hype cycle; it's a masterclass in the timeless principles of infrastructure, maintenance, and technical
#126 - AI Transformation at Scale: Practical Adoption Across 150+ Engineers with Peter Gostev // Head of AI @ Moonpig
How do you drive meaningful AI transformation across 150 software engineers without mandates or force? Peter Gostev, Head of AI at Moonpig, reveals the technical strategies and organizational approaches behind scaling AI adoption from 130 to 400+ users while navigating the gap between industry hype and implementation reality.
From managing complex integration challenges where 80% of AI projects i
#125 - Two CTO Dinosaurs vs. Today's Tech Hype with Raz Shuty // CTO @ auxmoney
What happens when two experienced CTOs sit down to debunk the latest tech trends? Raz Schweiger-Shuty, CTO at auxmoney, joins Tobi for an unfiltered discussion about the hypes, myths, and wastes of resources that plague modern tech companies.
After taking over a 17-year-old fintech platform with no prior CTO, Raz made controversial decisions that flew in the face of conventional wisdom: stopping
#124 - The Path to AGI: Inside poolside’s AI Model Factory for Code with Eiso Kant
How do you build a foundation model that can write code at a human level? Eiso Kant (CTO & co-founder, Poolside) reveals the technical architecture, distributed team strategies, and reinforcement learning breakthroughs powering one of Europe’s most ambitious AI startups. Learn how Poolside operates 10,000+ H200s, runs the world’s largest code execution RL environment, and why CTOs must rethink eng
#123 - From Nokia to AI-IoT: Engineering the Physical World with Bernd Groß // CEO @ Cumulocity
The physical world is becoming digital—and it requires fundamentally different technical architecture than traditional IT systems. Bernd Groß leads technical leaders through the evolution from enterprise software to industrial IoT, where real-time data from 30,000 wind turbines and millisecond-level decision-making define system requirements.
As co-founder and CEO of Cumulocity, Bernd has navig
#122 - Grid Control in Milliseconds: Engineering Energy Systems with Barbara Wittenberg // CTO @ 1KOMMA5°
Behind the renewable energy revolution lies complex technical infrastructure that CTOs across industries can learn from. Barbara Wittenberg leads a 250-person tech team at 1KOMMA5° that manages real-time data from 40,000+ connected energy assets while coordinating post-merger integration across 80+ companies in 7 countries.
This episode unveils the technical architecture powering virtual power pl
#121 - Canva's Playbook: Scaling Teams, Tech, and AI with Adam Schuck // Senior Engineering Director @ Canva
In this episode, Tobi chats with Adam Schuck, Senior Engineering Director at Canva, a company that has scaled to over 5,000 employees, 2,000+ engineers, and 230 million MAUs while remaining profitable. Adam shares his journey through startups (including acquisitions by Twitter and Canva) and large tech companies like Google, leading to his current role managing 220 engineers at Canva.
They dive d
#120 - AI's Singularity & Commoditization: Navigating Hype vs. Reality with Georg Zoeller // Co-Founder @ C4AIL
In this episode, Tobi talks with Georg Zoeller, Co-Founder of the Centre for AI Leadership and mercenaries.ai, about the turbulent landscape of AI. Georg, with his background at Meta and deep expertise in AI strategy, cuts through the hype surrounding AI's capabilities and economic impact.
They discuss the 'singularity' we're already in, driven by rapid, open-source AI development, and why this
#119 - Navigating Ambiguity and AI's Impact on Engineering feat. Ivan Kusalic // CTO @ Enpal
In this episode, Tobi talks with Ivan Kusalic, CTO of Enpal, who leads a team of 250 engineers at one of Germany's leading solar energy companies. Ivan shares insights from his extensive technical leadership journey and his recent return to coding after seven years due to his excitement about AI.
Ivan discusses how he navigates complexity and ambiguity in the renewable energy sector, where Enpal
#118 - Radical Engineering Culture and High Bar Hiring feat. Stefan Richter // Founder & CTO @ freiheit.com technologies
Discover insights into building a high-performance engineering organization with Stefan Richter, founder of freiheit.com technologies. With 25+ years of experience delivering successful software projects for the Who’s Who of European businesses and industries, Stefan shares his philosophy of radical engineering culture and maintaining an exceptionally high bar in recruiting. This episode dives dee
#117 - Navigating AI Trends with Dat Tran // Partner & CTO @ DATANOMIQ, VP AI/ML @ Beams Safety AI
AI is moving faster than ever, and staying ahead of the curve is a challenge for every tech leader. In this episode, Dat Tran joins Tobi to break down what’s happening in the AI space, from cutting-edge model releases to AI-powered productivity tools and the global race for AI dominance. Dat has spent years leading AI teams at Idealo and Axel Springer, co-founding AI-driven startups, and now helps
#116 - Exploring Platform Engineering feat. Camille Fournier // CTO @ Open Athena & Author @ O'Reilly Media
How do you create an effective platform team and optimize DevOps? Tobi interviews Camille Fournier about her career, technical insights, and best practices in platform engineering. Camille shares her journey from building her own computers and installing Linux in high school to becoming Managing Director at JPMorgan Chase and authoring influential books for engineers 📚.
👩💻 Camille's early fascin
115 - Exploring Growth and Compliance feat. Dennis Winter // CTO @ Börse Stuttgart
Ever wondered how regulated companies like stock exchanges handle tech growth? Dennis Winter (CTO @ Börse Stuttgart) shares how to build engineering organizations in regulated environments. With experience from embedded systems to leading tech at SolarisBank and Börse Stuttgart, he dives deep into scaling teams while maintaining security and compliance standards 🏦
🏗️ Early-stage tech decisions an
#114 - Building an SDK feat. Dr. Daniel Hauschildt // CPTO @ IMG.LY
Get insight into the SDK business (and learn about cross-platform performance and developer marketing) with Dr. Daniel Hauschildt (MD & CPTO at IMG.LY). As a client-side offering (no servers!), IMG.LY needs to take extra steps to ensure reliability on all devices 📱, platforms 💻 and browsers 🌐. From crafting developer-friendly documentation to optimizing performance on every device and platform ima
#113 - Faster Incident Response feat. Tim Armandpour // CTO @ PagerDuty
Plan and PRACTICE for better incident response with insights from Tim Armandpour, CTO of PagerDuty. Learn the secrets to resilience from the team that mitigated the impact of a major outage—handling a 250% traffic surge while delivering on their SLA.
Listen to find out:
- 🛠️ Why planning AND practice are both critical for incident response.
- 🚧 How to practice for incident response (e.g Failure
#112 - Cross Functional Team Members feat. Daniel Bartholomae // CTO @ optilyz
Find out about cross-functional team members with Daniel Bartholomae, CTO at optilyz (direct mail SaaS). At optilyz, team members wear multiple hats—whatever hats they need to own the product lifecycle. From product management and design to development and customer engagement, this model eliminates silos and drives efficiency. Daniel breaks down how this innovative approach works, the tools and pr
#111 - Organising for Impact feat. Eric Bowman // CTO @ King
How do we actually organize people to consistently deliver value and enjoy the process? This, Eric Bowman (CTO @ King) says, is the core challenge facing any CTO. In this thought-provoking episode, Eric shares insights from his remarkable career in gaming (The Sims, King), e-commerce (Zalando), and navigation technology (TomTom), offering a unique perspective on building high-performing teams and
#110 - Developer Efficiency feat. Rebecca Murphey // Field CTO @ Swarmia & Co-Author of Build
Become a more effective team in this CTO podcast featuring Rebecca Murphey, Field CTO of Swarmia and co-author of Build. From her years of experience working in the developer productivity organizations at Stripe and Indeed and now at Swarmia, Rebecca knows this conversation isn’t just about developer metrics and productivity - it’s about the broader picture 🖼️. How do we align🧭 our engineering wor
#109 - Cloud Cost Optimisation feat. Claire Fautsch // CTO @ Joblift
Save Money on Cloud Costs with Claire Fautsch (CTO @ Joblift). Find out how the team at Joblift slashed monthly cloud costs from €100K to €30K without compromising performance.
Listen to find out:
📊 How to build dashboards
📈 How to align cloud costs with business KPIs
🤝 How to get the entire team involved in cost optimization (Spoiler Alert: No FinOps team)
🛠 How to optimize resource allocation a
#108 - Monitoring as Code feat.Hannes Lenke // CEO & Co-founder @ Checkly
Keep an eye on the latest trends in this CTO podcast episode featuring Hannes Lenke (CEO and Co-founder of Checkly). Hannes shares insights from over a decade of shaping the testing and monitoring landscape. From AI-powered mobile testing to cloud-based browser testing to synthetic monitoring, he has seen it all.
Listen to found out:
👀 What is "Monitoring as Code"? How does it differ from traditio
#107 - Sustainability Over Hypergrowth feat.Tuomas Artman // CTO @ Linear
Grow the business, not the headcount with insights from Tuomas Artman (CTO of Linear). Saying no to hypergrowth helped Linear succeed, but how did they do it? How did they build a high-quality product with a smaller team?
Listen to find out:
- How to achieve quality products without increasing headcount 🌱
- Avoiding feature bloat: The pitfalls of customer-driven development ⚖️
- Why you should b
#106 - Meritocracy, Backend and Engineer-led Sales feat. Shyam Sankar // CTO @ Palantir Technologies
Discover new ways to do things with Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir, who is working to deprecate backend development using their experience with 150 independent dev teams running a collection of 5,000 microservices. Yet this podcast is more than that (although I was blown away by the demo)—expect great nuggets of wisdom on meritocracy, data, and of course, backend. Think of this podcast as a series
#105 - Trust & Accountability in Remote Teams feat. Sabrina Farmer // CTO @ GitLab
Find out how to build trust and accountability in a fully remote team in this CTO podcast featuring Sabrina Farmer, CTO @ GitLab. You will also hear how Sabrina draws on her experience in AI, DevSecOps, and her 19 years at Google to rethink the developer experience.
Listen to find out:
- How Gitlab's CEO Challenge encourages developers to innovate and automate away historic challenges (e.g. Log4j
#104 - End-to-End Technical Independence feat. Alexander Matthey // CTO @ Adyen
Discover the benefits of end-to-end technical independence with Alexander Matthey, CTO of Adyen.
Learn why Adyen cherishes its in-house strategy as Alexander shares how Adyen’s extreme technical independence (no third-party vendors) enables efficiency in everything from libraries to security.
Listen to find out:
- Security First: How Adyen makes security a priority for everyone. 🔒
- Pick Up the P
#103 - David Cramer // Co-Founder + CPO @ Sentry
Explore the evolution of both a product and the role of its co-founder in this CTO podcast featuring David Cramer (co-founder + CPO @ Sentry). You will discover the pros and cons of each stage in Sentry's journey (open source -> bootstrap -> VC) and why David's role evolved (CEO -> CTO -> CPO).
Listen to find out
🔄 Why his role has evolved: CEO -> CTO -> CPO
🧑💻 DevTool Marketing 101: Inspirati
#102 - Platform Engineering feat. Boyan Dimitrov // CTO @ SIXT
Discover how to leverage platform engineering 🏗️ for convenience, standardization, automation, and reduced cloud costs in this CTO podcast featuring Boyan Dimitrov (CTO @ SIXT). SIXT is a leading global mobility provider serving customers in over 100 countries worldwide. With 800 tech employees globally, they have spent the past eight years standardizing and modularizing their tech stack to achiev
#101 - AI Revolution Roundtable feat. Jonas Andruilis (Aleph Alpha), Rasmus Rothe (Merantix) & Johannes Schaback (SumUp)
Get ready for the AI industrial revolution 🦸 in this CTO podcast episode featuring a roundtable of AI AllStars!
So much is happening in AI, and you want to be part of it - that is why we asked
Jonas Andrulis (Founder and CEO of Aleph Alpha), Rasmus Rothe (Co-founder of Merantix and its AI Campus) and Johannes Schaback (CTO of SumUp) to share with us a broad overview of what CTOs need to know a
#100 - Intuition over 'Data Driven' feat. Jason Fried // co-founder + CEO @ 37signals
Trust your intuition, you will gain a lot from this CTO podcast featuring Jason Fried, co-founder and CEO of 37signals, a company known for having groundbreaking policies and products (Basecamp, HEY, Once, etc.). He is also a bootstrapping hero and author of multiple books (Getting Real, REWORK, REMOTE, It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work).
Listen to find out:
- Intuitive🔮 over ‘data-driven’ 🔢dec
#99 -Team Topologies 101 feat. Matthew Skelton, co-author of Team Topologies
Lead a more humane and effective organisation with inspiration from Matthew Skelton, co-author of Team Topologies. Inspired by system design💠, cybernetics🤖 and neuroscience 🧠, Team Topologies allows CTOs to structure their teams in a more humane way that reduces cognitive load 🤯 while increasing user value 🎯.
Listen to find out:
- Value Flow💦: What, why and how to find it
- Team Topologies🪢: The 3
#98 - Service Levels 101 feat. Alex Ewerlöf - Sr Staff Engineer @ Volvo Cars & SRE Thought Leader
Embrace the Site Reliability Mindset with Alex Ewerlöf, Sr. Staff Engineer @ Volvo Cars 🚗 and SRE thought leader. Understand how the different aspects of site reliability work together 🪢 and when you need a DevOps vs. Platform Team vs. SRE. Find out how to set your own Service Level Indicators (SLI), Service Level Objectives (SLO), and Service Level Agreements (SLA), as laid out by the creator of
#97 - From Maker to Multiplier feat. Pat Kua // CTO Coach and Founder of the Tech Lead Academy
Let’s become better Multipliers ✖️ in this CTO Podcast featuring Pat Kua, former CTO of N26 who by popular request now helps CTOs Level Up themselves and their teams. As a sought-after expert in helping ICs transition to leadership roles, Pat shares leadership gems with CTOs.
Listen to find out:
- Why you should fly high 🕊️and dive deep 🤿
- Why even ICs need leadership skills 🧑💻
- Maker⚒️ to Mult
#96 - Radical Transparency feat. Charles Gorintin // CTO @ Alan & Co-Founding Advisor at Mistral
Discover the power of radical transparency🧐 with Charles Gorintin, CTO of Alan (a French InsurTech) and founding force behind Mistral. He may work in a regulated space, but there is nothing typical about Alan’s setup when it comes to internal matters.
Public Salary Framework ✅Searchable Board Meetings ✅4 Managers for 90 FTE✅
Listen to find out:
- Why the Manager Role is split into Leads🧑💻 and C
#95 - Self-Efficacy and the journey from CTO to CPTO and Back feat. David Gebhardt // CTO @ mobile.de
Become a better CTO/CPTO with these insights from David Gebhardt, CTO (and former CPTO) of mobile.de (Germany’s largest car vehicle marketplace). Originally the Head of Tech, David evolved into CPTO, eventually leading the 400-strong Product +Tech teams before evolving business needs led him to bring on a CPO and go back to being ‘just’ the CTO (“only” 250 people). He shares why in this great CTO
#94 - Melanie Rieback // Co-founder & CEO at Radically Open Security
Let’s hack cybersecurity in 2024 with Melanie Rieback, Co-founder & CEO of Radically Open Security, the world’s first not-for-profit cybersecurity consultancy with a focus on PenTesting🔏.
Melanie is on a mission to fix cybersecurity consulting by putting people before profits and empowering internal teams “how to fish” 🎣.
Tune in to hear about the current cybersecurity landscape from the person
#93 - The Technical CTO + Readying for IPO feat. Allan Leinwand // CTO @ Webflow
Embrace the technical side 🔧 of the CTO role with Allan Leinwand, CTO of Webflow 🖱️ who has combined technical know-how with great products on every layer of the OSI Model: from setting up HP’s first ethernet, CISCO’s early networks, building the world’s first CDN at Digital Island, and continuing up the stack to enterprise cloud ☁️ (ServiceNow), social gaming 🎮 (zynga), communications 💬 (Slac
#92 - Manage yourself to better manage others feat. Johanna Rothman // The Pragmatic Manager
Want to become a better manager? Then manage yourself better!
From managing the time you spend managing, and all the way to managing how you give your team new tasks...
Let's get real with Johanna Rothman, whom they don’t call the Pragmatic Manager for nothing. You will love her straight-talking approach to management. After almost 40 years in management, she can boil down things to sharp prin
#91 - Autonomous Teams: Why, How and Who with Andy Walker // Former Senior Tech Leader @ Skyscanner + Google
Empower your team with the right type of autonomy 🚀 as we define the balance in this CTO podcast with Andy Walker, who has years of experience leadings teams at Skyscanner and Google. After 30 years in tech, Andy finally has the time to share what his hard won insights about tech leadership. You will enjoy his nuanced approach to autonomous teams, team size and work-life balance.
Listen to f
#90 - Bob Moesta // Co-Architect of the "Jobs to Be Done" Theory
Invest your engineering resources better by truly understanding the core problem your product needs to solve with this CTO podcast featuring Bob Moesta, co-architect of the Jobs to be Done Theory.
As an engineer-turned-product-guru, Bob’s explanation of Product Discovery will delight your nerd brain 🧠 (complete with references to set theory, push-pull forces, and the problem space) while being s
#89 - Melissa Perri // Author of "Escaping the Build Trap" and "Product Operations"
Craft the ideal product strategy in this CTO podcast episode with Melissa Perri, author of “Escaping the Build Trap” and “Product Operations”.Find out how to become truly product-led: from your strategy to your metrics to your tooling.
Listen to find out:
- How to balance qualitative 😍 and quantitative data 🧪 in product
- Were the mass layoffs caused by overhiring? 🫠Is it a natural part of growth
#88 - Luca Rossi // Creator @ refactoring.club 🌀
Stay on top of your professional development with these learning and productivity tips from Luca Rossi, whose refactoring.club newsletter 🌀 is read by 50k subscribers every week. After scaling Wanderio to 25M users 🚀 as founding CTO, Luca sat down to distill his experiences and in the process created the tech leadership content 📰 he so badly needed. With diagrams. 🖼️ In this alphalist CTO podcas
#87 - Scott Chacon // Co-founder of GitHub and GitButler
Reimagine version control systems with Scott Chacon, Co-founder of GitHub and GitButler.
Because, even Scott, a Git Veteran, will admit it:
```
Git is a pain sometimes. 🫣
```
There is a serious Merge Conflict ⚔️ between how modern developers code and the workflow ordained by Git in the Linux mailing list days.
Version Control Systems need to be taken apart by First Principles 🧩 so they can b
#86 - Leading Through A Layoff // feat. Mike Fisher - Former CTO @ Etsy
Is there a nice way to downsize? Mike Fisher, former CTO of Etsy, shares what he learned when the company downscaled by 27% in 2 rounds of layoffs right before he joined. Find out how you can help your team navigate this sensitive period - both pre- and post-layoff.
- How much time⏳ you lose in a layoff (the productivity cost of layoff)
- Why you can’t expect to cut costs ✂️ AND grow
- Why Avai
#85 - Thomas Dohmke // CEO @ GitHub
git checkout the future of software development with Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub. In this broad podcast, we discuss everything from refactoring and scaling to the CTO/CEO role, from open source to AI as a Dev Tool. Every day Thomas delves into the development of software development - so his 🧠 was a great brain to pick.
Listen to find out:
- Why refactoring 🧩 will always be a part of growth.
-
#84 - Abi Noda // Co-Creator of the DevEx Metrics Framework
Find out the best way to measure Developer Experience 🧑💻in a way that truly enables ⚡ your developers (i.e. Developer Productivity) in this CTO podcast with Abi Noda - co-creator of the DevEx Framework and founder of Pull Panda. For years Abi has been on a quest to discover what developer metrics are the key to happier and more productive developers. He tried PR Analytics (he created Pull Panda
#83 - Aviran Mordo // VP Engineering @ Wix
Get inspired about architecture - that of computers and teams - in this CTO podcast with Aviran Mordo, VP Engineering at Wix. I really enjoyed talking with Aviran about both the technical nitty gritty of powering millions of websites as well as the Wix model which - unlike the Spotify model - is still in use at its flagship company over a decade later
Listen to find out:
- How the Wix model works
#82 - Gertrud Kolb // CTO @ Eyeo
Find out how to restructure your org using a matrix structure with Gertrud Kolb, CTO of eyeo (the company behind common adblockers). You will find out how Gertrud implemented changes across an already large organisation - from the team typologies to team communications.
Listen to find out:
- How to restructure using team topology 🧩best practices in a large organisation.
- How to improve requireme
#81 - Teresa Torres // Author of 'Continuous Discovery Habits'
Find out how to do continuous product discovery with Teresa Torres who has taught over 12,000 people how to sustainably infuse their daily product decisions with customer input. You will find out why product should not be just a job title, but a mindset that the entire C-suite needs to share.
Listen to find out:
- What is an outcome-orientated mindset? Do we need OKRs?✅
- How to build a contin
#80 - Sarah Polan // Field CTO @ Hashicorp
Find out how to use platform engineering to scale your DevOps 🚀with this hands-on podcast with Sarah Polan, Field CTO at HashiCorp. Sarah is passionate about 2 things: DevSecOps 🔏 and automating everything 🔁 (she even automates aspects of her childcare :)). Which is why this podcast episode is all about scalability 📈 - from attrition-proof DevOps to automated audits. This is a must-listen podcast
#79 - Dr. Steven Rogelberg // Author of "Glad We Met: The Art and Science of 1:1 Meetings"
Did you know that effective 1:1s will 3X your employee engagement? 🤩
Maximise your 1:1 meetings 🤝 by leveraging the meeting science discovered by Steven Rogelberg (Chancellor's Professor at UNC Charlotte and author of 2 top-ranked books about meeting science: “The Surprising Science of Meetings” and “Glad We Met: The Art and Science of 1:1 Meetings”). As an organisational psychologist 🧑🔬who has a
#78 - Stephen Wolfram // Founder & CEO of Wolfram Research
It is time to stop learning the computer’s programming language, and get computers to learn our language.
Prepare think different - or should we say alien 👾 - in this CTO podcast with Stephen Wolfram (Founder & CEO of Wolfram Research). Find out why we need to use computational thinking to create code in a way humans can both write ✍️ and read 📖.
Listen to find out:
>> What is the programming w
#77 - Vikas Gupta // CTO @ Choco
Find out how to use tech to deliver (not distract from) business value in this CTO podcast featuring Vikas Gupta, CTO at Choco (a digital platform connecting suppliers to their restaurants), who previously held senior engineering roles at Uber and Dropbox.
Listen find out :
- ⚖️ How to balance product and platform initiatives
- 🔍What the 5 dimensions are for evaluating a language
- 🎩 CTPO v
#76 - Richard Socher // CEO @ You.com
Get a handle on the latest developments in AI 🤩 in this CTO Podcast featuring Richard Socher, CEO of You.com (the world’s first AI-centric chat-based 💬 search engine). This is your opportunity to learn from the AI professor 🎓who co-authored the paper that introduced the term ‘prompt engineering’, created MetaMind 🧠(now powering Einstein at Salesforce) and pioneered many of the technologies every
#75 - John Engates // Field CTO @ Cloudflare
Buckle up for a journey through the evolution of DevOps with John Engates, the Field CTO at Cloudflare, who has been leading the charge since his days as CTO of Rackspace (2002-2018). Get ready for a fascinating ride as we explore the role of AI in DevOps and gain insights from a true industry veteran.
Listen to discover:
- How to handle incident response the Cloudflare way🚨: mission rooms, commu
#74 - Shawn 'swyx' Wang // Developer Experience Expert
Dig deep into how to use generative AI as developer tool 🧑💻in this CTO podcast featuring Shawn ‘Swyx’ Wang. Shawn has not only headed Developer Experience at 3 Unicorns 🦄, but he is also the editor of the Latent Space AI/ML newsletter. Tune in to discover how generative AI will change programming and how to start exploring the world of LLMs.
Learn:
- How our infrastructure 🏗️ needs will evolve
#73 Will Larson // Thought Leader @ Irrational Exuberance (lethain)
Focus on your CTO career in this podcast with Will Larson about leaving a CTO role, finding a new CTO role, and negotiating your compensation. Will is the thought leader behind the popular blog "Irrational Exuberance" and the book "An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management" and "Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track". Additionally, he is the former CTO of Calm who has
#72 - Kent C. Dodds // Co-Founder of Remix
Like the UX of a SPA but developing it is a nightmare🤔?
Then you should listen to this podcast about PESPA (Progressively Enhanced Single Page apps.🤩.
You will learn from Kent C. Dodds, 💁♂️co-founder of Remix about this latest web architecture which combines the UX of a SPA (no full-page refreshes 🔄 with a better DX👨💻 (no code duplication and less mess🫣). With companies like Microsoft, Netfli
#71 - Malte Ubl // CTO @ Vercel
Learn about the future of front-end with Malte Ubl (CTO at Vercel). Malte is the creator of JSConf.eu and has extensive experience in engineering teams on projects like Wiz (the front-end framework Google still uses in most of their consumer apps) and Google Search (Desktop). Now he is at Vercel - mainstreaming the tools and techniques common in BigTech - to other tech companies.
Listen to find o
#70 - Dominik Angerer // Cofounder and CEO @ Storyblok
Learn out to run your remote 🌎 company effectively with tips from Dominik Angerer, co-founder, and CEO of Storyblok. He shares tips and insights on everything from remote recruiting to onboarding and engagement. Plus, he shares the story behind the Storyblok tech stack, and why, after years of being bootstrapped, they decided to seek funding.
Listen to find out:
- Remote Compensation 💸: How he
#69 - David Linthicum // Chief Cloud Strategy Office @ Deloitte Consulting
Find out how to optimize your cloud ☁️costs in this CTO podcast featuring David Linthicum (Chief Cloud Strategy Officer at Deloitte, Author of Insider’s Guide to Cloud Computing, and #1 Cloud Influencer).
This is your opportunity to hear about the efficient use of cloud computing from someone whose 35-year 🫡 career includes serving as CTO at five companies, writing 15 books, publishing 7000 artic
#68 - Patrick Campbell // Founder & CEO @ ProfitWell
Find out how to price your SaaS product effectively 💸 in this podcast featuring Patrick Campbell of ProfitWell (a SaaS for subscription analytics, retention, and pricing solutions). He shares pricing insights he has learned by looking over 🧐 the data of 73 000 SaaS companies over the past decade!
Listen to find out:
You - How to get the right 🎯price for your SaaS Product
- Freemium 🆓 or free
#67 - Renaud Visage // Co-Founder & ex-CTO @ Eventbrite
Find out how to bootstrap and scale fast in this CTO podcast featuring Renaud Visage - Co-Founder & ex-CTO at Eventbrite🎟. He shares what he would do differently if he would bootstrap Eventbrite again, his approach to the evolving role of the founding CTO, and climate-friendly tech.
Listen to find out:
- Bootstrapping: Why you should hire senior devs 👨💻 as soon as possible
- Cloud☁️ vs. On-Prem
#66 - Dr. Thanasis Noulas // VP Engineering @ Trade Republic
Get insight into product analytics from Dr. Thanasis Noulas, VP Engineering at TradeRepublic - whose 15+ year data career has spanned industries as diverse as trading, accommodation (Booking.com & AirBnB), Mobility (Uber) and Content (Netflix).
Listen to find out:
- How to be data-informed when you can’t be data-driven (e.g. in a regulated industry ⚠️)
- How to A/B test correctly (sample si
#65 - Ryan Singer // Creator of the Shape Up Method
Find out how to ship meaningful products 👍 on time ⌛ with proper product shaping in this CTO podcast with Ryan Singer, the creator of the Shape Up Method 💪. The Shape Up Method aims to better define and prioritise 🤔 projects before they are sent to be built and shipped.
Listen to find out:
- How to timebox effectively 📅 (SPOILER: Its not 2 or 6 weeks)
- Why tickets don’t work 🎫
- What is the
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