Geeks Who Lead Podcast
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 provide you with access to hard-won wisdom from top engineering leaders and relevant domain experts. Learn more at https://geekswholead.com/
Episodes
204 episodes
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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35:13
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 so...
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42:04
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 ...
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41:04
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...
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38:59
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 perso...
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33:57
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 fas...
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43:14
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 Jer...
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40:16
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 engi...
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37:03
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 ...
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32:18
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 Pr...
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32:31
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-ca...
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35:34
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 sp...
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35:59
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 pl...
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36:52
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 gr...
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35:06
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 effecti...
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34:56
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 speedi...
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40:10
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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29:04
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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25:08
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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21:54
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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22:19
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 ...
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3:31
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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28:10
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 cultur...
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Episode 2
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31:25
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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26:43
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...
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Episode 1
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29:32
