alphalist.CTO Podcast
In this podcast, the host Tobi interviews CTOs to technical and leadership discussions. Topics like current challenges, hiring but also deep technical topics he wants to understand and make understandable. Amongst his guests are the most relevant CTOs europe and this world has seen to share their best practice and knowledge. The goal is to support others on their journey through tech and engineering, inspire and allow to sneak-peek into other successful companies to understand how they think and act.
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#20 - John Graham Cumming // CTO Cloudflare
This time I spoke to John Graham-Cumming, the CTO of ? Cloudflare?, a publicly listed CDN and Edge Computing platform.Topics we touched: * His GNU Make book ;-) * How they grew to 25 BN marketcap ? * What he thinks about edge computing and concrete usecases for it * How COVID changed the ? security world ? * How they operate and maintain a global network with millions of serversThanks a lot John for the Chat. Looking forward to see what Cloudflare comes up with next.
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#19 - Mitchell Hashimoto // CTO HashiCorp
This time I'm talking to an absolute legend: Mitchell Hashimoto, the CTO of HashiCorp the company behind a series of brilliant open source products (Terraform, Vault, Nomad, Vagrant) that are highly successfully both business wise and community wise. I would even argue that HashiCorp is the only company that manages to do that.We talk about: * The path from 7 to 1000+ employees in the last 10 years ? * How Mitch is still able to be a very active github user and contribute a lot of code while growing a big enterprise company to IPO * How to build successful open source projects * Where to draw the line in open core businesses * How to be able to prevent cloud providers from sucking your blood
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#18 - Jean-Denis Greze // Head of Engineering at Plaid
Podcast time! In this episode I'm chatting with Jean-Denis Greze, the Head of Engineering @ Plaid and former Director of Engineering at Dropbox. Plaid is a fintech Unicorn from the US that just turned down an acquisition by Visa.We spoke about: * The upcoming topic ? Privacy Engineering ? and how it will change our thinking * How plaid handles 1000s of connections to banks and integrates with a lot of legacy APIs just fine * His thoughts around Defi and Blockchain * How they do good business in fintech without touching any money ?It was great having you, Jean-Denis!
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#17 - Eric Bowman // SVP Engineering TomTom
This time in the podcast I have a very bright guest I admire for years: Eric Bowman, SVP Engineering at TomTom, Former VP Engineering at Zalando AND one of the developers behind the game "The Sims" ?♂️ He is a brilliant mind when it comes to tech leadership and has strong opinions on autonomy and empowerment.Topics we touched: * How 90s gaming development compares to 20s large scale tech teams * What TomTom does these days and the technical challenges in location based services & mapping these days * How to establish tech culture and open source in a large enterprise * The challenges of the automotive industry in a software world ? * ? The importances of the accelerate KPIs in modern engineering orgs and how to move fast ?It was a pleasure talking to you, Eric!
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#16 - Tyler McMullen // CTO Fastly
This time, I have a very technical podcast on Webassembly and the new kid on the block: the Edge Cloud with Fastly's CTO Tyler McMullen, one of the leading CDNs and edge cloud companies out there.* The future of distributed computation: From Serverless to ☁️ Cloudless ☁️ * Webassembly as the new industry standard intermediate representation/micro container. And guess what? Your browser most likely already supports it! * How a CDN works internally and the challenges of building it * How he manages to still be a coding geek in ? 10BN companyThis podcast was actually recorded shortly before Covid - if you wonder how we could meet up in Berlin ;-)
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#15 - Jean Michel Lemieux // CTO Shopify
This time I had Jean Michel Lemieux or short JML, the CTO of ? Shopify ? in the podcast. Craziest fact: He took the time two days before black Friday ?. In the podcast he also told me why.We spoke about: * His fight against crazy ? sneaker - sniping - bots and how Shopify keeps people in line happy with games * What it takes to run the largest Ruby on Rails (majestic ;-)) monolith on the planet * Why he does not believe in microservice architecture but still runs some services * How he keeps his 2000 engineer army ? aligned * Why he still sells stuff for kids online through his own platformIt was crazy fun, even if I missed the swearing after David Heinemeier Hansson took that route.
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#14 - David Heinemeier Hansson // CTO Basecamp, inventor of Ruby on Rails, bestselling author & Race driver
In this episode I am thrilled to welcome David Heinemeier Hansson, CTO of Basecamp, inventor of Ruby on Rails, founder of Hey.com, book author of books like "Remote" or "It does not have to be crazy at work".Some topics we touched: * How David Discovered the magic of Ruby ? * How he finds moments of deep flow in programming and racing * Why Smartwatches are a gift from hell⌚ * Why the 60 hour work week is a stupid lie * Why he would immediately quit if he was hired as CTO of Zalando ? * How they successfully manage Basecamp, and why "the Spotify Model" is a myth☠️ Strong language, be careful ☠️ And: You might notice that I had to laugh at least 60% of the time. Thanks David for your time and this great episode.
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#13 Matthias Laug // CTO & Co-Founder at TIER mobility
Podcast time! This time I have the chance to talk to the judo brown belt owning CTO of the scooter& mobility startup TIER mobility Matthias Laug. Before TIER he co-founded Lieferando and boy, he's a nice guest to talk to.We spoke about: * Why he puts people over tech * What they use to run their large IoT stack * His vision of Scooters talking to each other in a huge mesh * Why he after founding Lieferando and having a large exit still started at Thoughtworks * When to not do backflips even if you perfected doing themHe also briefly mentions Eric Bowman, Martin Fowler and Pat Kua who have one thing in common: I did not interview them for the alphalist podcast - Would be happy to chat with you guys too! :)
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#12 with Johannes Schaback // CTO at Home24
This time I am talking to my friend Johannes Schaback, CTO of Home24, who is also originally a co-founder of alphalist and one of the brightest minds in the German engineering, tech and business-tech scene. We are talking about his journey through the AI and data world, the Do's and Don'ts and the real world, no bullshit application of machine learning.We are Tackle: * Data is the new oil - wrong or right? * The machine learning models @ Home24 * How ML-infrastructure evolved in the last decade * The necessity to spend more time in the problem space before entering the solution spaceWe talk about mentorship and great people he learned from (*ping* Marc Appelhoff, Brigitte Wittekind, Christian Weiss, Philipp Kreibohm ;-)). Thanks a lot Johannes and looking forward to track your successes at Home24, your career and investments.
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#11 with Ahti Heinla // Co-founder & CTO at Starship Technologies
In this podcast, it's all about complicated things and my guest masters them all: IoT, Robotics, AI and customer acquisition. Ahti Heinla is former founding engineer of Skype and now runs Starship Technologies as Founder and CTO. In this podcast we talk about * Robotics as the coolest thing to build as an engineer * How I stopped one of his Robots in Hamburg * The hard things about robots ? * The hard things about bringing ML models to productionThanks again Ahti for being my guest and looking forward to see more and more of your robots in the wild. Great to see so much innovation coming from Estonia. Looking forward to feedback and guest proposals.
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#10 with Marty Cagan // Partner at Silicon Valley Product Group
Wow, my guest this time is able to see through the matrix ?: It's Marty Cagan, inventor of product discovery and best selling author of the book "INSPIRED", one of the partners of the Silicon Valley Product Group and potentially the biggest eye opener for 90% of the delivery organizations out there: We are most likely doing our job wrong!He saw so much different product and delivery orgs from Apple to Google to Spotify and talks about his learnings:* How agile is interpreted wrong in 90% of the companies * How modern organizations waste their resources * How to tackle product discovery and user testing * Autonomy vs. EmpowermentThanks Marty, it's been a blast!
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#09 with Christian Hardenberg // CTO Delivery Hero
It's podcast-time! This time, I spoke to Christian Hardenberg, CTO of Delivery Hero ? and formerly Rocket Internet ? on how to scale an engineering org from 200 to 2000 people. Delivery Hero just entered the DAX a week ago and is worth almost 20 BN as of today. He shared his perspective and thoughts on: * How to measure software developers at scale * How they keep up the pace / velocity * What he thinks about OKRs * How they manage to integrate all the acquired entities and teams * Their secret sauce and why he thinks it is better than googleIt was really an honor to talk to you Christian, I am looking forward talk again, latest at 30 BN… ;-)
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#08 with Peter Großkopf // CTO Börse Stuttgart Digital Exchange
This time, I have the honor to talk to Peter Grosskopf, CTO of Börse Stuttgart digital exchange and former CTO of Solarisbank. He's an amazing guy for philosophical discussions around finance, tech and we share one love that is no longer as cool as it was in the 00's: Ruby on rails!This time we discuss: * How he made regulations his hobby ? and wants developers to feel like working for Spotify or Soundcloud even with regulations in place * The do's and don'ts in Fintech * Why he rather picks mature stacks (aka Postgres and Ruby on rails) against the "new kids on the block" * How he thinks about new things tech like Apache KafkaThanks again for being my guest, it was a lot of fun.
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#07 with Sergei Anikin // CTO Pipedrive
I had the chance to interview Sergei Anikin about how to scale a SaaS product. Sergei Anikin comes with vast experience in “large scale tech” as he was with Skype when it was sold 3 times (eBay, Private Equity, Microsoft) and is CTO at 90-million funded pipedrive (CRM SaaS) now. Laser sharp focus on the essential features “Scaling problems are good problems to have” Microservices vs. Monoliths Team structure at scale: Missions and tribes (https://medium.com/pipedrive-engineering/scaling-pipedrive-engineering-from-teams-to-tribes-8f14fd92df8c) How they do M&A and post merger integration It was an honor to talk to Sergei Anikin and see him joining alphalist as a new member too. Looking forward to your comments, feedback and guest proposals.
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#06 with Mikko Hyppönen // F-Secure
I had to deal with cybersecurity topics recently; I've even been in touch with the FBI ?. On this occasion I invited a brilliant guest for the alphalist Podcast: It’s Mikko Hyppönen, a computer security specialist and scientific director at the security company F-Secure. He spent half of his life hacking and chasing hackers and he knows how to talk about it: I saw at least 3 TED Talks by him and yes, they are very entertaining and helpful.Key topics in the Podcast are: - The recent twitter hack and the stupidness of the hackers - How cybersecurity evolved and became a required skill for companies and countries - His recommendations for modern mid sized companies around Cybersecurity (Where to start with processes, recruiting, tools, budgets) - What to do if you’ve been compromisedYou won’t regret that you've listened :-)
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#05 with Sebastian Thrun // Google X
I am thrilled to announce this weeks podcast guest: Prof. Sebastian Thrun Brief overview: He is a Stanford professor, founder of Google X, built the first self driving car, won the Darpa-Award for it, started the online-academy Udacity and is now building autonomous planes at Kitty Hawk. Wow. Can you tell why I highly admire him and how excited I was when I won him for my podcast? We talked about the car nation in Germany, how competitive we are in the AI and software world, Stanford vs. TU-Munich, why Sebastian is striving for a brain-computer interface, why he has built the leading online university Udacity and how to tackle machine learning as a modern CTO. He also explains why he eventually comes up with a Bluetooth-connected Smart-Bra next.
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#04 with Daniel Gebler // CTO Picnic
In this episode of the Podcast Tobias is talking to Daniel Gebler, the CTO of the “dutch supermarket unicorn” Picnic about his story from the 4k Demo Scene to operating and growing picnic to a billion Euros marketcap and 5000+ employees. Topics we touch in this episode: - How Picnic works - Why they chose to build an app-only platform - Picnics secret sauce in data science, supply chain and fulfillment - How there business and tech literally exploded with Corona - His thoughts on Microservices And many more! Thanks a lot to Daniel, we had a great time!
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#03 mit Jan Ramm // FreeNow
In dieser Ausgabe begrüssen wir Jan Ramm, den CTO der FreeNow Gruppe (ehem. MyTaxi). Wir sprechen unter anderem - von seinem Werdegang vom Schulschwimmer zum CTO - wie und wo FreeNow seine Entwickler sucht & findet - wie sich der Mobility Markt entwickelt hat und noch entwickelt - was sein Blick auf Mobile-Frameworks ala Flutter ist.Danke an Jan für das tolle Gespräch.
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#02 mit Stephan Schulze // Project A
Stephan Schulze ist bei alphalist Mitglied der ersten Stunde. Als CTO von Project A hat er sehr viele Startup-Technologien von innen sehen - quasi der Mann, der schon alles gesehen hat ;-)Wir sprechen heute aus der Vogelperspektive unter anderem über folgende Themen: Tech in Project A Startups (Frameworks, Tools, Sprachen, Trends & Prozesse), seinen Einfluss als VC auf die Technologie in Project A Startups und natürlich über mein Lieblingsthema, die technical due diligence. Also den Qualitätscheck den er als VC bei allen Startups durchführt.
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#01 mit Sebastian Betz // About You
In der heutigen Folge spreche ich mit Sebastian Betz, dem CO-CEO und CTO von About You über technologische Trends, Frameworks und aktuelle Hypes sowie seinen Job als CTO und wie der Tech Stack von about you unter der Motorhaube aussieht.
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