0.58 – Hire for Vigilance & Excellent Practical Judgement — Quin Hoxie w. Swiftype

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This episode is co-hosted by Jacob Ablowitz.  We are honored today to be interviewing  Quin Hoxie, founder and CTO of Swiftype.   This episode covers Quin’s experiences as an engineer at Scrib, and then as Co-Founder and CTO of Swiftype — The leading platform delivering search solutions for businesses.
Quin’s Bio

Quin Hoxie is the Co-Founder and CTO of Swiftype, the leading search platform for delivering fast, relevant and customizable search results for businesses. After graduating from University of Arizona in 2008 with a B.S. in Computer Science, Quin worked on search at AboutUs before joining Scribd in 2010 to work on their search team. His experiences building the search platform at Scribd led him to start Swiftype with fellow Scribd engineer Matt Riley in 2012. Since graduating from Y Combinator in Winter 2012, Swiftype has become the easiest way to add powerful search to any website or application. With clients ranging from TechCrunch to Hubspot to Qualcomm, Swiftype powers billions of searches every month across the web.

About Swiftype

Founded in 2012, Swiftype’s industry leading search platform delivers relevant and customizable search results for businesses. Swiftype’s suite of products, Site Search and Enterprise Search, have revolutionized the way people find information across their organization and on public facing websites. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company has raised $23 million in funding, by investors including NEA and Y Combinator. Its strong customer portfolio includes AT&T, Shopify, SurveyMonkey, Dr. Pepper, publishers Engadget and TechCrunch, and brands like Qualcomm, Asana, Marketo and Hubspot.

About Jacob Ablowitz
Jacob Ablowitz serves as Co-Founder and CEO of dmi.io, the marketplace for business data. dmi is transforming business decision-making by democratizing access to data-driven insights through connecting sellers and buyers of data while streamlining data discovery, evaluation and contracting.
Jacob has deep experience with the data and technology systems that power the modern information economy. He began his career at Lockheed Martin, working on bleeding-edge ballistic missile defense and submarine sonar systems. At Dealertrack Technologies (now Cox Automotive), Jacob led infrastructure projects underpinning their market-leading car loan application platform. In 2012 he moved on to Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world, in an analytics role, before starting dmi in 2013.
Jacob holds a B.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the University of Colorado and a Master’s in Systems & Information Engineering from the University of Virginia. He is an active member of the Colorado startup community.

0.35 – Reinventing the Organization w. Dan Kador, CTO of Keen.io

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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 Keen — a leader in the analytics space.  Join us to learn about the growth of Keen.io at 3, 10, 30, and (soon) 100 team members; and Dan & his co-founders journey to building a different type of organization — with a team that’s got the autonomy, purpose, and tools they need to deliver great analytics software.
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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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0.31 – Advancing Your Career is like Playing Great Chess w. Chris McAvoy

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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 about playing positional chess so that you have all of your pieces in place so when an opportunity presents itself you can take advantage of it.

Chris is a technology leader with a passion for open source communities, innovative products, software and architecture.  He is presently a mentor at Techstars and the VP Engineering at Cognizant QuickLeft.  

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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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0.25 Building Teams that create Customer Success w. Ingrid Alongi

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Ingrid Alongi is the co-founder of Quickleft, a software development firm in Boulder Colorado which was acquired by Cognizant in March of 2016.  In this episode, Ingrid takes us through the founding story of QuickLeft, and how QuickLeft used Net Promoter Scores to drive great outcomes for end-customers.

Find Ingrid on Twitter at @electromute and check out QuickLeft at QuickLeft.com.

Favorite Quotes:

My biggest engineering value is pragmatism and collaboration. Things get done better when you work as a team. The best solution is the one that launches.

Its really important to be able to communicate ideas, and to sell your ideas; even if the client is not technical. We invest in speaking at conferences and blog posts a lot.

If people write software on time and clients are happy, then that’s a success. It doesn’t matter as much if the code they write is poetry.

I’ve seen the ebb and flow of people wanting more structure and then less structure. Organizations today are much flatter than they used to be.

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0.22 — Creative engineers are the leaders of the software world – Jud Valeski

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(review this episode on iTunes)

Jud Valeski was co-founder of Gnip (acquired by Twitter), a real-time data portability software initiative. From client-side consumer facing products, to large scale back-end infrastructure projects, he has enjoyed working with technology for over twenty years. He’s been a part of engineering, product, and M&A teams at IBM, Netscape, onebox.com, and AOL. He has played a central role in the release of a wide range of products used by tens of millions of users worldwide.

Find Jud on twitter at @jvaleski and at http://one.valeski.org/.

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