Geeks Who Lead Podcast
Activity Overview
Episode publication activity over the past year
Episodes
Performance Management at Indeed
27 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Performance management has been a hot topic during this “year of efficiency”. In this Interview RC Johnson shares his experiences of building out,...
Allison McMillan - Making offsites meaningful
20 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In a world where getting everyone into the same office five days a week is increasingly difficult, offsites are becoming an essential tool for alignin...
Paul Zhang - Town halls - influence at scale
13 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Over the last decade as Avant has scaled to an 800+ person company, town halls have been a consistent pillar of their interval communications strategy...
Aviv Ben-Yosef - Accelerating Developer Growth
06 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Hiring junior developers is always a concern. They’re easier to find and cost less than experienced engineers, but in addition to being less product...
Rukmini Reddy - Leading with Empathy During Change
29 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
As engineering leaders, we have a responsibility to our organizations and their bottom line. At the same time, we’re leading humans, not automatons,...
Kit Colbert - From intern to CTO - lessons learned
23 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Kit Colbert has taken an atypical route to becoming the CTO of a large, publicly traded corporation. He started at VMWare 20 years ago as an individua...
Jeremiah Stone - Choosing the right level of abstraction
15 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Naturally, as CTOs, we often think about our job as to work with developers to ship software. But what does that mean in a world of frameworks, low co...
Josh Builder - Creating a compelling engineering brand
08 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Over the last decade Josh Builder has led engineering at The Orchard (music), SoulCycle (fitness), Rent the Runway (fashion), and now Signify Health (...
Albert Wenger - Preparing for LLMs
01 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this week's interview with Albert Wenger, Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures, we discussed the changes that LLMs might bring - to our e...
Raji Subramanian - The three stages of value creation
25 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Raji Subramanian brings a wide range of experience to the role of CTO at Opendoor (Nasdaq OPEN). She honed her technical chops culminating in a Princi...
Yoav Grossman - Adding LLMs to your product - a case study
18 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This week I interviewed Yoav Grossman, VP of Product & Engineering at Spinach.io about how they went about identifying potential use cases for LLM...
Mike Boufford - Creating an AI Strategy
11 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Just before our CTO summits in May I got to chat with Mike Boufford, CTO at Greenhouse about his experiences in getting up to speed with GenAI and LLM...
Gayatri Iyengar - The Art of Storytelling for Managing Stakeholder Relationships
03 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Especially when building platform or infrastructure, sometimes it can be difficult for non-technical stakeholders to truly appreciate the value of the...
James Turnbull - Trimming your operating costs
28 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this wide ranging discussion, I speak with James Turnbull, SVP Engineering at Sotheby’s about his approach to managing his costs during a downtur...
Mona Soni - Why the grand hybrid experiment is going to fail!
21 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
While there has been a major push to return to the office (by many managers and a good number of ICs), when remote is done right, it can reduce costs,...
Matt Welsh - LLMs for engineering teams - a practical guide
14 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Do you still have doubts about the wisdom of leveraging LLMs in software development? Maybe you’re not sure how much they can help or how best to ge...
Mission Driven - Josh Nesbit: Founding Member, Widespread Care
28 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Josh Nesbit (Founding Member, Widespread Care) about what it looks like to be mission driven in h...
Mission Driven - Jim O’Leary: VP of Engineering, Signal
28 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Jim O’Leary (VP of Engineering, Signal) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his wo...
Mission Driven - Sam Quigley: CEO, Kicho Inc
14 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Sam Quigley (CEO, Kicho Inc) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his work.
Mission Driven - Max Roser: Researcher at University of Oxford / Founder & Director of Our World In Data
31 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Max Roser (Researcher at University of Oxford / Founder & Director of Our World In Data) abou...
Peter Bell - Refocusing the business and the podcast
19 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We’re going to take a breath on the CTO Connection podcast for the next 3-4 weeks. When we first started the podcast, it was a “startup CTO podcas...
Mission Driven - Laura Edelson: Postdoctoral Researcher / Co-Founder, NYU / Cyber Security for Democracy Project
10 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Laura Edelson (Postdoctoral Researcher at NYU, and Co-Founder of Cyber Security for Democracy Pro...
Jason Wodicka - Interviewing for culture
29 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In part two of my interview with Jason Wodicka, Staff Software Engineer at Karat, we dig deeper into the process of creating predictive, fair, and eff...
Mission Driven - Fred Diego: Co-Founder & CTO, Streetwide
20 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Fred Diego (Co-Founder & CTO, Streetwide) about what it looks like to be mission driven in hi...
Jason Wodicka - Building a structured interview process
15 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Especially in the early days, too many companies still have ad-hoc interview processes or over index on things like resumes which aren’t super predi...
Mission Driven - Adam Kircher: Co-Founder, Sirum
06 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Adam Kircher (Co-Founder, Sirum) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his work.
Hilary Mason - Can they do the work?
01 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
I was lucky enough to attend a dinner during which Hilary Mason dropped more wisdom about hiring in one course than many people do in a 90-minute talk...
Mission Driven - Ariel Ekblaw: CEO, Aurelia
22 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Ariel Ekblaw (CEO, Aurelia) about what it looks like to be mission driven in her work.
Jesse White - Lessons learned from burnout
17 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Jesse White grew with the company over at OpenNMS, from developer through to hands on CTO. He started with a team of just five, but as the company and...
Mission Driven - Nellwyn Thomas: CTO, Democratic National Committee
08 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Nellwyn Thomas (CTO, Democratic National Committee) about what it looks like to be mission driven...
Raffi Krikorian - Introducing Mission Driven
03 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this very special episode, I get to introduce and interview Raffi Krikorian about his new podcast series - mission driven - that we’ll be hosting...
Short Byte: Ron Lichty - The multiple levels of engineering management
27 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
These days it’s quite possible to be hacking on an idea in a dorm room one week, and just a few weeks later to be the CTO of a venture backed star...
Short Byte: Matt Powell - Aligning annual planning with agile teams
20 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
There is always a tension in a mature business between the need for certainty when engaging with the rest of the company and the need for flexibility ...
Short Byte: Matt Stephenson - Diversifying your engineering pipeline through internships
13 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
It can be hard to think about your long term engineering talent pipeline when you need to hit your quarterly recruiting and product delivery milestone...
Short Byte: Maher Saba - Remote Presence at Meta
06 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this week's interview, I get to chat with Maher Saba, VP of Remote Presence (and Head of Engineering) at Meta. Before Meta, Maher was a senior...
Short Byte: Francisco Larrain - Hiring multifaceted engineers
29 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Francisco Larrain is the CTO and co-founder at Topsort - a company that provides auction-based ad infrastructure for multi-brand retailers and online ...
Short Byte: Steven Gaffney - Essential elements of a consistently high achieving team
22 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From Amazon to Lockheed Martin, Steven Gaffney has helped a wide range of companies to improve the effectiveness of their teams. In this week's e...
Short Byte: Vidal Graupera - Challenges of being an engineering manager
15 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Often, developers are just thrown into engineering management with little to no training. 'Congratulations, today you're the manager,' ...
Short Byte: Griffin Caprio - Career progression as an engineering leader
08 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Griffin had a fairly traditional early career path, moving from sys admin and software development into engineering leadership. More recently he’s b...
Short Byte: Mark Porter - Exercising Judgement
01 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, I get to chat with Mark Porter, the CTO of MongoDB. Mark was previously the CTO at Grab and the GM for RDS at AWS and, after joining ...
Short Byte: Jeremy Johnson - Building a truly global, distributed engineering team
25 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Jeremy Johnson has been building globally distributed teams since before it was cool 😊. After co-founding 2U, in 2014 he co-founded Andela to help ...
Short Byte: Ravi Mayuram - Modernizing your data infrastructure
18 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, I got to talk with Ravi Mayuram, CTO at Couchbase. From edge persistence and self healing databases to quantum computing, we got to c...
Short Byte: Mindaugas Mozūras - Mental health for engineering leaders
11 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this week's episode, I got to talk with Mindaugas Mozūras, who runs an engineering org of over 400 people for Vinted out of Lithuania. We tal...
Short Byte: Ismael Peinado - Simplifying Security
04 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
If you’re at Coinbase, JP Morgan, a power company, or the NSA, you can skip this episode. If you’re not expecting attacks from nation states, migh...
Short Byte: Randy Kern - Bringing quality to your technology and your teams
28 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Join me in this episode as I chat with Randy Kern, CTO at Marqeta about “bringing quality to your technology and your teams”. From code quality (R...
Short Byte: Ami Luttwak - The Scalable Startup
21 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Wiz became the world's fastest unicorn last year when it raised $250m at a $6B valuation just 18 months after it was founded. In this episode, I ...
Short Byte: Arunava Bag - Beyond DevOps - the promise of AI Ops
14 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Arunava Bag is the CTO (EMEA) at Digitate and in this episode, he provides an introduction to the topic of AI Ops - how you can start to leverage mach...
Short Byte: Satish Jayanthi - The CTOs guide to trends in data analytics
07 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
If you’re a software engineering leader who has been less focused on the data analytics and data engineering space over the last few years, join me ...
Short Byte: Juan Pablo Buriticá - Building global teams
30 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In addition to being the SVP Eng at Ritchie Bros and previously being Head of Engineering, LATAM at Stripe, and VPE at Splice, Juan Pablo Buriticá is...
Short Byte: On Freund - What skills do your developers really need?!
23 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Writing code is seldom the hardest part of launching and maintaining an application. In this week's episode, I chat with On Freund - cofounder an...
Short Byte: Joris Dries - Growing vs hiring leaders: a case study
16 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
When Joris Dries, CTO of Resonate Solutions in Sydney lost his team lead in the middle of a growth spurt, he had to figure out how he could keep on sc...
Short Byte: James Kenigsberg - Run, grow, transform
09 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This week I got to chat with James Kenigsberg - perhaps best known as the founding CTO at 2U. James shares his thoughts on making transformations trac...
Short Byte: Dave Mangot - Architecture matters, technology doesn’t
02 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Dave Mangot is the principal at Mangoteque, and has successfully led DevOps transformations and operational maturity achievement at companies like Sal...
Short Byte: Jon Williams - Planning for failure
26 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In addition to being the founder of the New York CTO Club, Jon Williams is also a fractional CTO. In this episode, in addition to briefly discussing h...
Short Byte: Doron Grinstein - Moving towards a Netflix grade cloud maturity
19 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Before founding Control Plane Corporation, Doron was the Chief Software Architect for the cloud services platform at VMWare, a principal architect at ...
Short Byte: Gary Davis - Improving your interview process
12 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Given the demand for engineering talent, it’s important not to exclude great candidates just because they didn’t go to the right school or don’t...
Short Byte: Joe Lynch - How to grow the leaders within your org
05 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Bringing new leadership into an engineering org is slow, expensive, and can be risky. It makes much more sense to focus most of the time on how you ca...
Short Byte: Michael Stahnke - A deep dive into the “four core metrics”. And “what’s next”?!
28 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, I talk with Michael Stahnke, VP Platform at CircleCI about the “four core metrics”, and what’s next. Michael was Director of En...
Short Byte: Mark Birch - Selling as a CTO
21 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
While we often think of ourselves as technologists, CTOs and engineering leaders are also in the business of sales. Whether it’s internal stakeholde...
Short Byte: Colleen Tartow - Building and managing a Hybrid team at Starburst Data
14 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the less than two years since Colleen Tartow, Ph.D. joined Starburst Data as Director of Engineering, the company has scaled from ~80 to ~350 sta...
Short Byte: Aaron Erickson & Brian Guthrie - Good and bad reasons to reorg
07 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As VPE at Meetup.com during the fallout from the WeWork implosion, Brian saw first hand some of the challenges in organizing and reorganizing an eng...
Short Byte: Frederic Rivain - Building products with privacy and security in mind
31 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As the CTO at a password management company, Frederic has to be passionate about security and privacy, but in this episode, he breaks down the importa...
Short Byte: Kimberly Wiefling - Overcoming the pandemic of disengaged employees and dysfunctional organizations
24 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this wide ranging interview, Kimberly Wiefling, Cofounder of Silicon Valley Alliances shares a range of perspectives on how and why so many people ...
Short Byte: Mike Boufford - Making “distributed” work at Greenhouse
17 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Like many other companies, when covid hit, Greenhouse had to up its remote/distributed engineering game. From normalizing on a “one person, one scre...
Short Byte: Jonathan Moore - Culture and the mental health of your team
10 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From covid lockdowns to Black Lives Matter to January 6th, it’s been a couple of years. Teams expect more out of the companies they work for and als...
Short Byte: Christine Spang - Multivariate optimization while scaling - beyond just gender balance
24 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Back in 2019, Christine gave an awesome talk at our in-person San Francisco summit about how she had built an engineering org of ~30 with a 50:50 gend...
Short Byte: Erik Peterson - Managing cloud costs
10 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As cloud costs continue to become a bigger business expense, it’s increasingly important to have a proactive strategy for managing and understandi...
Short Byte: Dan Langevin - Building an engineering culture of accountability and curiosity
27 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As companies scale, it’s always a challenge to ensure that the dev team is as committed and passionate about the product as the founders. In this ep...
Short Byte: Mark Van de Wiel - Managing an engineering team through an acquisition
13 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What with covid and the great resignation, it’s hard enough to keep an engineering organization intact, aligned and motivated. Imagine doing the sam...
Short Byte: Marko Gargenta - Tech enablement - the hard part of developer education
30 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The hard part of developer education isn’t teaching your team a new language or framework. It’s teaching your team how you use the language or fra...
Short Byte: Ramana Satyavarapu - Engineering management vs leadership
23 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Ramana Satyavarapu is the CTO at Finix - a payments solution for SaaS companies. Previously he was Head of Data Engineering Platform and Product at Tw...
Short Byte: Ron Lichty - Starting a new engineering leadership role
16 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
For most of us, jumping into engineering leadership at a new company is only something we do every 3-5 years. Today's guest, Ron Lichty, Consulti...
Short Byte: David Subar - How to choose a CTO coach
09 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
No matter how experienced you are, there are times where it can make sense to get a second pair of eyes on a problem. For small questions you can alwa...
Short Byte: Joe Bradley - Leveraging conversational AI
02 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Conversational AI has come a long way from simple rules based chatbots, but it's still a complex and quickly evolving space. Join me as I chat wi...
Short Byte: Claudius Mbemba - Sustaining culture within a remote-first team
25 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
We're all dealing with remote-first teams now whether we like to or not. But the more I investigate hybrid working options, the more likely it se...
Short Byte: Labhesh Patel - Diversity, Inclusion and Bias in AI Systems
18 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Most companies are increasingly trying to leverage data science to achieve their business goals, but it's easy to create biased models that disad...
Short Byte: Charlie Reverte - Retaining your team during the 'great resignation'
11 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The great resignation is both a threat and an opportunity for engineering leaders. To avoid regrettable attrition, you need to make sure you are track...
Short Byte: Jossie Haines - Empathy and Inclusion in Engineering Leadership
04 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
To create a truly diverse and inclusive team where everyone can thrive and share their views, engineering leaders need to abide by the following three...
Short Byte: Ben John - Managing engineering at scale
21 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In this wide ranging talk, I chat with Dr. Ben John about his experiences in scaling and managing the team at AppNexus (and post AT&T acquisition ...
Short Byte: Anne Lise Waal - Gaming the enterprise
07 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
It's not easy to bring gaming technologies into the enterprise. From hardware limitations to unreasonable expectations, it's challenging to ...
Short Byte: Colin Earl - How and why CTOs should engage with no-code tools
23 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
They're coming. From bubble.io and webflow through UI Path and Blue Prism, the chances are that someone within your company is already building a...
Short Byte: Mark Reese - Starting from somewhere else
09 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Wellington, NZ isn’t the obvious place to start a SaaS company. But Xero has built a globally distributed team of over 1800 people in product and en...
Short Byte: Adam Sypniewski - Going against the flow
26 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
One of the biggest risks for an engineering org is the “Not Invented Here” syndrome where the tech team wants to rethink every decision and rebuil...
Short Byte: Anurag Gupta - The importance of automating production ops
12 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
While running database services for AWS, Anurag Gupta, now Founder & CEO of Shoreline.io, learned the importance of going beyond monitoring and in...
Short Byte: Rob Zuber - Being an executive first
30 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
As a CTO, you're not just responsible for running the engineering team...Because you're also a C-level executive with the responsibility to ...
Short Byte: Tim Olshansky - Managing hybrid remote teams
17 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Short Byte: Tim Olshansky - Managing hybrid remote teamsWe can't put the remote genie back in the bottle, but with some people desperate to get o...
Short Byte: Jeff DeVerter - Do you even know what software your company is developing?
20 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Short Byte: Jeff DeVerter - Do you even know what software your company is developing?The good news is that software development has moved from a peri...
Short Byte: Jeffrey Spector - Why you have to improve your hiring process
31 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Short Byte: Jeffrey Spector - Why you have to improve your hiring processWith demand for talent at an all time high, if you want to attract, identify ...
Short Byte: Camille Fournier - Managing a product focused engineering org
11 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Short Byte: Camille Fournier - Managing a product focused engineering orgCamille Fournier is perhaps best known for her amazing book “the managers p...
Short Byte: Mai Irie - What to do when your engineering leader leaves
25 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Short Byte: Mai Irie - What to do when your engineering leader leavesMai Irie is a director of engineering, but twice in the last two years she’s ha...
Short Byte: Lee Edwards - How to pick the right tech startup
20 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Short Byte: Lee Edwards - How to pick the right tech startupWhether you’re thinking of founding, joining or investing in an early stage tech company...
Short Byte: Johnny Ray Austin Measuring outcomes vs. inputs
13 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Short Byte: Johnny Ray Austin - Measuring outcomes vs. inputsHow can you best measure the effectiveness of your engineering team? Lines of Code writte...
Short Byte: James Smith - Building vs buying software
06 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Building vs buying softwareBuilding vs buying is always a fraught decision. Nominally buying a solution provides more capability and a quicker time t...
Short Byte: Heidi WIlliams - Building a startup within a startup
29 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Building a startup within a startupThere are a unique set of constraints when you’re running an engineering team at a “startup within a startup”...
Short Byte: Juan Pablo Buriticá 12/17/2020 - learning the craft of engineering management
17 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
JP learned engineering management the hard way - and he’s passionate about helping new engineering leaders to have a better pathway to building thei...
Short Byte: Cat Miller 12/3/20
03 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Culture work is part of a developers jobAt Flatiron Health, the team thinks that getting IC’s to invest in the team culture is so important that the...
Using ML/AI to Analyze Your Log Files with Christian Beedgen
02 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
According to Christian Beedgen CTO and co-founder of Sumo Logic, there is no magic bullet when it comes to innovation. His brain child, Sumo Logic, wa...
Using Data Science to Deliver Tangible Business Outcomes with Ian Wong
08 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Companies have largely figured out software. Data science, however, seems to be the new frontier. Many data scientists are coming from largely academi...
API-First Companies with Paolo Negri
01 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Content should be both structure driven, and easily integrate with software. But most Content Management Systems are legacy systems that are not intui...
Globally Distributed Teams vs. Remote Teams with Gustavo Niemeyer
24 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Thanks to the pandemic, many people are getting their first taste of working remotely. But for Gustavo Niemeyer of Canonical, having a globally distri...