Parallel Engineering Paths, Culture Building & Co-Founding (part 1) with Viraj Mody & Tom Kleinpeter #34

We deconstruct two distinct career paths in engineering & leadership and a co-founder relationship 15 years in the making! Tom & Viraj share formative startup experiences that shaped their careers as a Principal Engineer & Eng Leader. Plus insights shaping their new company on assessing risk, dealing with open-ended problems, being decisive, & removing non-coding time for engineers VIRAJ MODY, CO-FOUNDER & CTO @ COMMON ROOMViraj led engineering organizations at Convoy and Dropbox, helping both companies scale their teams and products. Viraj was also a founding engineer at Audiogalaxy, where he worked alongside Tom, which was acquired by Dropbox. TOM KLEINPETER, CO-FOUNDER & CHIEF ARCHITECT @ COMMON ROOMTom was a Principal Engineer at Dropbox, and before that the CTO at Audiogalaxy and FolderShare, startups which sold to Dropbox and Microsoft, respectively. He’s also the co-host of The Downtime Project - https://downtimeproject.com/ a podcast that helps engineers learn from the Internet’s most notable outages. SHOWNOTESThe Beginning - How Tom & Viraj first met over 15 years ago (3:48)The Early Days - Microsoft, Tom’s start-up jump to Audiogalaxy, and why Viraj followed (8:55)Lessons in hiring and assessing risk at an early stage startup (15:07)”Yo, I don’t even know how to use a Mac…” + other strong opinions & mantras from their early start up experience (24:07)What happens when you remove decision-making delays & non-coding time from an engineer’s schedule (29:03)What principal IC’s & engineering leaders have in common... “Your job is to be decisive!” (34:08)Takeaways (39:17) Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at sfelc.com! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.