Geeks Who Lead Podcast
by Peter Bell
Hear the inside stories of the "geeks who lead at scale" - Directors, VPs and CTOs running software engineering orgs at larger companies with 100+ engineers, and interviews with domain experts who can help those leaders to manage their engineering orgs more effectively. I'm your host - Peter Bell, I've been helping senior engineering leaders to connect with and learn from their peers since 2010! This podcast is designed for engineering leaders who want to learn the latest good practices from their peers who are way too busy operating to write an article or publish a book! Running a software engineering org at scale is hard! You need to manage stakeholder expectations, attract and retain top talent, align and structure your org effectively and keep up with the latest processes and tooling. And that's before we even try to make sense of the potential impact of LLMs and GenAI on managing technical teams. Our podcast and weekly newsletter provi
Episodes
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Performance Management at Indeed
Performance management has been a hot topic during this “year of efficiency”. In this Interview RC Johnson shares his experiences of building out, scaling and refining the performance management process at Indeed.
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Allison McMillan - Making offsites meaningful
In a world where getting everyone into the same office five days a week is increasingly difficult, offsites are becoming an essential tool for aligning and connecting teams, departments and companies. But all too often, the planning falls to someone with limited events or facilitation experience…
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Paul Zhang - Town halls - influence at scale
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 to support and reinforce culture. This week Paul Zhang shares his experience and approach to running both company wide and department specific…
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Aviv Ben-Yosef - Accelerating Developer Growth
Hiring junior developers is always a concern. They’re easier to find and cost less than experienced engineers, but in addition to being less productive, they can easily become a drag on the performance of the senior devs you depend upon to ship mission critical features. Drawing on his experience...
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Rukmini Reddy - Leading with Empathy During Change
As engineering leaders, we have a responsibility to our organizations and their bottom line. At the same time, we’re leading humans, not automatons, and understanding and supporting the people in our org is both the right thing to do as a person and the most effective way to deliver business…
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Kit Colbert - From intern to CTO - lessons learned
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 individual contributor and worked his way up to CTO leading a 2,300 person engineering org. In this fascinating interview, we walk through Kit’s progression...
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Jeremiah Stone - Choosing the right level of abstraction
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 code, no code, and even GenAI solutions? In this fascinating interview, I got to chat with Jeremiah Stone, CTO of SnapLogic about heuristics for...
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Josh Builder - Creating a compelling engineering brand
Over the last decade Josh Builder has led engineering at The Orchard (music), SoulCycle (fitness), Rent the Runway (fashion), and now Signify Health (healthcare). None of these were deep tech companies, but in each case, he found a core of engineering excellence and used that to entice and retain...
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Albert Wenger - Preparing for LLMs
In this week's interview with Albert Wenger, Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures, we discussed the changes that LLMs might bring - to our engineering teams, our products, and our society. We looked at the potential impact on how we write software, what software we need, opportunities for…
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Raji Subramanian - The three stages of value creation
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 Principal Engineer role at Amazon and then ran engineering orgs at Yahoo and Amazon and cofounded Pro.com which was acquired by Opendoor. In this wide...
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Yoav Grossman - Adding LLMs to your product - a case study
This week I interviewed Yoav Grossman, VP of Product & Engineering at Spinach.io about how they went about identifying potential use cases for LLMs within their product, spiking, implementing, and releasing an offering. It’s a great mini-case study of the steps involved in adding GenAI to a…
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Mike Boufford - Creating an AI Strategy
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 LLMs as a non-expert. In this thought provoking interview Mike explains how he got up to speed with the capabilities of the latest LLMs and his…
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Gayatri Iyengar - The Art of Storytelling for Managing Stakeholder Relationships
Especially when building platform or infrastructure, sometimes it can be difficult for non-technical stakeholders to truly appreciate the value of the work being done. In this interview, Gayatri Iyengar shares her experiences building platform solutions at both Uber and Doordash and how she used...
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James Turnbull - Trimming your operating costs
In this wide ranging discussion, I speak with James Turnbull, SVP Engineering at Sotheby’s about his approach to managing his costs during a downturn. From cloud spend and SaaS costs to prioritizing fewer projects and hiring globally, it’s a great insight into how a traditional enterprise is...
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Mona Soni - Why the grand hybrid experiment is going to fail!
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, provide access to a much wider talent pool, make teams more productive and scale more effectively (beyond a certain team size, every company is...
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Matt Welsh - LLMs for engineering teams - a practical guide
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 get started with them. Or maybe you’re well into the process of experimenting with LLMs for speeding up software development and you’d just like to...
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Mission Driven - Josh Nesbit: Founding Member, Widespread Care
Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Josh Nesbit (Founding Member, Widespread Care) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his work.
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Mission Driven - Jim O’Leary: VP of Engineering, Signal
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 work.
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Mission Driven - Sam Quigley: CEO, Kicho Inc
Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Sam Quigley (CEO, Kicho Inc) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his work.
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Mission Driven - Max Roser: Researcher at University of Oxford / Founder & Director of Our World In Data
Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Max Roser (Researcher at University of Oxford / Founder & Director of Our World In Data) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his work.
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Peter Bell - Refocusing the business and the podcast
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 podcast”. We’ve really enjoyed sharing the wisdom and experience of our guests on building and managing engineering teams at startups. However, we’ve seen…
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Mission Driven - Laura Edelson: Postdoctoral Researcher / Co-Founder, NYU / Cyber Security for Democracy Project
Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Laura Edelson (Postdoctoral Researcher at NYU, and Co-Founder of Cyber Security for Democracy Project) about what it looks like to be mission driven in her work.
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Jason Wodicka - Interviewing for culture
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 efficient interview loops. In this episode we start with culture - how do you identify the cultural attributes important to help someone thrive in…
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Mission Driven - Fred Diego: Co-Founder & CTO, Streetwide
Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Fred Diego (Co-Founder & CTO, Streetwide) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his work.
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Jason Wodicka - Building a structured interview process
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 predictive of likely performance and tend to exclude many great candidates. In this episode, I get to chat with Jason Wodicka, Staff Software Engineer at...
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Mission Driven - Adam Kircher: Co-Founder, Sirum
Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Adam Kircher (Co-Founder, Sirum) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his work.
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Hilary Mason - Can they do the work?
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. In this week's episode, I get to chat with Hilary, learning how she thinks about screening for judgment, identifying the requirements for a role,...
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Mission Driven - Ariel Ekblaw: CEO, Aurelia
Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Ariel Ekblaw (CEO, Aurelia) about what it looks like to be mission driven in her work.
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Jesse White - Lessons learned from burnout
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 the team grew, he founds himself working longer and longer hours until he finally burned out. After taking time to get back in balance, he…
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Mission Driven - Nellwyn Thomas: CTO, Democratic National Committee
Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Nellwyn Thomas (CTO, Democratic National Committee) about what it looks like to be mission driven in her work.
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Raffi Krikorian - Introducing Mission Driven
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 and distributing on a regular basis. From VP Engineering at Twitter and leading the self driving group at Uber to being the CTO of the Democratic...
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Short Byte: Ron Lichty - The multiple levels of engineering management
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 startup. Unfortunately, jumping straight from college to the C suite can be problematic as the organization scales and the CTO needs to bring to bear…
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Short Byte: Matt Powell - Aligning annual planning with agile teams
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 and agility when dealing with the complexities of software development. In this episode, Matt Powell, CTO at FTD shares the details of exactly how…
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Short Byte: Matt Stephenson - Diversifying your engineering pipeline through internships
It can be hard to think about your long term engineering talent pipeline when you need to hit your quarterly recruiting and product delivery milestones. But if you don’t start to invest in a talent pipeline you’re going to be scrambling every quarter to meet your numbers. At Code2College, Matt...
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Short Byte: Maher Saba - Remote Presence at Meta
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 developer at IBM and a Dir Eng & Distinguished engineer at Microsoft. In our conversation, we discussed why he made the move to Meta, how he thinks…
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Short Byte: Francisco Larrain - Hiring multifaceted engineers
Francisco Larrain is the CTO and co-founder at Topsort - a company that provides auction-based ad infrastructure for multi-brand retailers and online marketplaces. Before that, he founded Zapped (payment tech) and ran local engineering at Groupon. In this week's episode, we discuss what he looks...
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Short Byte: Steven Gaffney - Essential elements of a consistently high achieving team
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 episode, we discuss the elements of a high achieving team - from having a clear north star purpose, goal, and strategy to promoting honest communications...
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Short Byte: Vidal Graupera - Challenges of being an engineering manager
Often, developers are just thrown into engineering management with little to no training. 'Congratulations, today you're the manager,' and they don't know what to do. It's a totally different job." Vidal Graupera has spent years gathering insights into and working through the challenges of being…
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Short Byte: Griffin Caprio - Career progression as an engineering leader
Griffin had a fairly traditional early career path, moving from sys admin and software development into engineering leadership. More recently he’s been scratching his entrepreneurial itch. In this interview, we discuss some of the things that make software development and engineering leadership a...
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Short Byte: Mark Porter - Exercising Judgement
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 MongoDB as CTO in the pandemic's early days, has scaled the engineering org from 400 to over 1000 people over the last two years. In this...
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Short Byte: Jeremy Johnson - Building a truly global, distributed engineering team
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 companies to more easily take advantage of top engineering talent - in Africa and beyond. In this week's episode, listen to Jeremy as he shares his...
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Short Byte: Ravi Mayuram - Modernizing your data infrastructure
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 chat about a range of the trends he’s been seeing in the data persistence space. PARTNER Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence...
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Short Byte: Mindaugas Mozūras - Mental health for engineering leaders
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 talked about the importance of mental health, the benefits of therapy, and what getting coaching and mental health support taught Mindaugas about managing…
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Short Byte: Ismael Peinado - Simplifying Security
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, might you be able to simplify your security operations by focusing on the highest likelihood threat vectors? This week I chatted with Ismael Peinado, CTO…
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Short Byte: Randy Kern - Bringing quality to your technology and your teams
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 (Randy is a fan of strong typing and static analysis) to the value of early mentorship and the benefits of spending longer as an IC before moving to the...
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Short Byte: Ami Luttwak - The Scalable Startup
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 chat with Ami Luttwak, Cofounder and CTO at Wiz about his experiences and model for building “the scalable startup”. With an unabashed commitment to...
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Short Byte: Arunava Bag - Beyond DevOps - the promise of AI Ops
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 machine learning to engage with the telemetry from your production systems to eventually provide for automated incident resolution and/or forecasting…
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Short Byte: Satish Jayanthi - The CTOs guide to trends in data analytics
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 in this week's episode where Satish Jayanthi, CTO and Cofounder at Coalesce.io gets me up to speed with the current landscape. Learn about the...
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Short Byte: Juan Pablo Buriticá - Building global teams
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 also one of the authors of the excellent Holloway guide to Remote Work https://www.holloway.com/g/remote-work/about (along with the also awesome...
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Short Byte: On Freund - What skills do your developers really need?!
Writing code is seldom the hardest part of launching and maintaining an application. In this week's episode, I chat with On Freund - cofounder and CEO of Wilco and previously VPE at Handy and WeWork. He shares his journey from completing a degree in computer engineering to learning how to be a...
About this show
Hear the inside stories of the "geeks who lead at scale" - Directors, VPs and CTOs running software engineering orgs at larger companies with 100+ engineers, and interviews with domain experts who can help those leaders to manage their engineering orgs more effectively.
I'm your host - Peter Bell, I've been helping senior engineering leaders to connect with and learn from their peers since 2010!
This podcast is designed for engineering leaders who want to learn the latest good practices from their peers who are way too busy operating to write an article or publish a book!
Running a software engineering org at scale is hard! You need to manage stakeholder expectations, attract and retain top talent, align and structure your org effectively and keep up with the latest processes and tooling. And that's before we even try to make sense of the potential impact of LLMs and GenAI on managing technical teams.
Our podcast and weekly newsletter provi
Hosted by
Peter Bell
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