0.38 – Understanding People is a Superpower; @rands, VP Engineering at Slack

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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 worrying about staying relevant, he writes about pens, bridges, people, poker, and werewolves at the popular weblog, Rands in Repose. He works as the VP of Engineering at Slack in San Francisco where he’s furiously working on helping teams reinvent work.
Michael has written two books. His first book “Managing Humans, 3rd Edition” is a popular guide to the art of engineering leadership and clearly explains that while you be rewarded for what you build, you will only be successful because of your people. His second book “Being Geek” is a career handbook for geeks and nerds alike.

Michael plays hockey, mountain bikes, tinkers with drones, and drinks red wine in the redwoods of Northern California whenever he can because staying sane is more important than staying busy.

Favorite Quotes:

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0.36 – From Zero to Sphero w. Ian Bernstein, CTO @Sphero

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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 and adults love about their smart devices and fuse it with our robots that exist in the real world. 

Ian’s passion is in electronics and robotics. Ever since he was 12 years old he has been building robots.  Learn about how he parlayed his love of robotics into one of the most successful robotics company in the country.  Sphero is a robotic ball that can be controlled with a smartphone.  The company also makes the BB-8 toy robot featured prominently in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. 

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0.34 — Building for Massive Scale w. Tim Jenkins, CTO of SendGrid

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Today we are honored to be joined by Tim Jenkins, CoFounder & CTO of SendGrid.   SendGrid solves problems for companies sending transactional e-mail. Tim is currently involved with back-end development, operations, and support, and has worn many hats as SendGrid has grown from 3 team members to over 300 over the last 8 years.

Join us to hear the founding story of one of the most successful email deliverability providers on the web, take a journey through the ebb & flow of a CTO’s responsibilities as a company scales massively, and learn about how SendGrid’s culture has been defined by the 4 H’s: honest, hungry, humble, and happy.
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0.27 Scaling the Rocket Ship w. Julia Austin of DigitalOcean

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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.

Find Julia on twitter at @austinfish and find DigitalOcean at DigitalOcean.com

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0.8 — Phone calls from the CTO of Heroku — Jay Zeschin

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Jay Zeschin is a co-founder and the Chief Architect at Ello. Jay sits down with Miles during the “How to CTO” event at Boulder Startup Week to talk about what it’s like managing a team of engineers when everything is going really well and when you’re getting so much traffic and users that the CTO of Heroku calls you to see if they can help.

Follow Jay on twitter and ello at @jayzes.

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