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
Great Engineering War Stories
Today's episode is from the archives. Last week, @owocki’s startup released a new product — The battles last week during this release reminded us of some of our favorite engineering war stories. We ask...
Your Startup is a Pirate Ship w. Jack Dietrich & Ryan VanMiddlesworth
Our guests this week are Jack Dietrich and Ryan VanMiddlesworth of Fount Studio. Join the...
Advancing Your Career is like Playing Great Chess w. Chris McAvoy
Today's episode is from the archives.We are joined this week by Chris McAvoy to talk about growing your people & their careers. Learn why advancing your career is like playing great che...
Reinventing the Organization w. Dan Kador, CTO of Keen.io
Today's episode is from the archives.Dan Kador is the co-founder & CTO of Keen.io. He’s responsible for building the technology and team responsible for ana...
Optimize Your Learning Velocity w. Scott Carleton, Andela
Our guest today is Scott Carleton.Scott has a passion for building communities and empowering self-growth through education. Scott is currently the VP of Technology at
Building for Massive Scale w. Tim Jenkins, CTO of SendGrid
Today's episode is from the archives.We are honored to be joined by Tim Jenkins, CoFounder & CTO of SendGrid. SendGrid solves problems for ...
Find a Niche and Be The Best w. Courtland Allen of IndieHackers.com
Our guest this week is Courtland Allen; MIT graduate, Y Combinator alum, full-stack web developer, and professional designer. He’s spent over 8 years building, designing, and marketing web-based product...
People First Organizations w. Dave Zwieback
Our guest today is Dave Zwieback, the author of Beyond Blame: Learning from Failure and Success and an engineering leader in various organizations in & a...
Mission Driven Tech w. Zack Bomsta, Owlet
Our guest today is Zack Bomsta, CTO of Owlet, which produces the Owlet Baby Monitor. In addition to growing the team, he is involved in electronic hardware design and miniaturizati...
Scaling the Rocket Ship w. Julia Austin of DigitalOcean
Our episode today is from the archives. Julia Austin is the CTO of DigitalOcean and a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School of Entrepreneurial Management. Hear about her experiences scaling at rocket ship speed leading DigitalOcean’s eng...
Understanding People is a Superpower; @rands, VP Engineering at Slack
Michael Lopp (also known as @rands) is a Silicon Valley-based engineering leader who builds both people and product at companies such as Borland, Netscape, Palantir, Pinterest, and Apple. While he’s not wo...
From Startup CTO to Acquired by Google — Anant Jhingran, CTO @Apigee
Anant Jhingran has been in the tech industry for 27 years and has a Ph.D. in Database Systems from Berkeley. He’s been at IBM, CTO of Apigee, and then after Apigee was acquired, at Google...
From Zero to Sphero w. Ian Bernstein, CTO @Sphero
Our guest this week is Ian Bernstein, CTO of Sphero. Sphero is creating a new category of toys called “Connected Toys” that take the best of what kids a...
Reinventing the Organization w. Dan Kador, CTO of Keen.io
Dan Kador is the co-founder & CTO of Keen.io. He’s responsible for building the technology and team responsible for analytics via APIs (among a million other things) at...
Building for Massive Scale w. Tim Jenkins, CTO of SendGrid
Today we are honored to be joined by Tim Jenkins, CoFounder & CTO of SendGrid. SendGrid solves problems for companies sending transactional e-mail. Tim...
Cross-Training with Sales & Marketing w/ Patrick McKenzie (@patio11)
(BONUS EPISODE FROM THE ARCHIVES)Learn about how Patrick McKenzie combined his technical skills with marketing/sales skills to launch & grow several successful internet businesses.Patrick is the creator of Bingo Card...
Bend the Learning Curve by Consistently Putting Yourself into a Place You’re Uncomfortable — Kathy Keating
We’re joined this week by guest co-host Diana Pfeil to interview Kathy Keating — Kathy is a Colorado-based Startup CTO who has helped build several successf...
Hire Engineers that are Smarter Than You Are w. Jud Valeski
This week’s episode is from the archives. It’s an interview with Jud Valeski. Jud was a co-founder of Gnip (acquired by Twitter), a real-time data portability software initiative. From client-side consumer-facing products to large scale back-...
Engineering Values Roundup
We ask each of our guests what their engineering values are. What we love about this question is that the answers boil down the brass tacks of leadership into 2-3 minutes of fundamentals.We’ve got a fun little thematic episode this ...
Advancing Your Career is like Playing Great Chess w. Chris McAvoy
We are joined this week by Chris McAvoy to talk about growing your people & their careers. Learn why advancing your career is like playing great chess; It’s not about having a great strategy; It’s ...
Great Engineering War Stories
Last week, @owocki’s startup released a new product — The battles last week during this release reminded us of some of our favorite engineering war stories. We ask every CTO on our show “What is your fa...
Building Successful Distributed Teams – Gevorg Hovsepyan
Gevorg was the Co-Founder/CTO of LionSharp, where he led the development of Gesture and Voice controlled systems. After he left Lionsharp, he became an Agile product/project manager. Join Gevorg as we chat about collaborative leadership, agil...
Rethinking Education from First Principles w. Manuel Mattke
Manuel Mattke is an innovator, entrepreneur, tech product guy (and from time to time developer), with a background in finance, technology, and innovation consulting. This week i...
Quantifying Engineering w. Travis Kimmel of Gitprime
We’re taking this week off; If you’re in the US, you’re celebrating Thanksgiving. If you’re not in the US, you can still give thanks — Listen to one of our favorite episodes from the archives: Quantifying Engineering w. Travis Kimmel of Gitpr...
Scaling the Rocket Ship w. Julia Austin of DigitalOcean
Julia Austin is the CTO of DigitalOcean and a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School of Entrepreneurial Management. Hear about her experiences scaling at rocket ship speed leading DigitalOcean’s engineering and product teams.Fi...
