Introducing Our Hosts: Scott and Brad
Tech Journeys: From Early Internet Days to AI and Beyond
In this episode, hosts Scott Porad and Brad Hefta-Gaub share their extensive career journeys in the tech industry, revealing their paths from early consumer-facing internet roles to leading engineering teams at high-growth startups.
Scott discusses his rise from building websites at the University of Washington to heading engineering at TaskRabbit, highlighting his ventures in online media, e-commerce, social media, and gig economy businesses. He also touches on his evolving perspectives on AI and the distinctive culture at TaskRabbit's parent company, IKEA.
Brad recounts his tenure at RealNetworks, his experience with VR ventures, his adventures in the mountains, and his current role focusing on remote work technology.
Both hosts share insights on the challenges of transitioning from engineering roles to CTO positions and the importance of balancing business acumen with technical expertise.
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00:00 Introduction and Podcast Announcement
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00:41 Meet Scott: Career Journey
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01:32 Early Career and Internet Boom
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02:52 Successes and Failures in Startups
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04:24 Working with Brad and Healthcare Challenges
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08:12 Current Role at TaskRabbit
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10:03 Insights on IKEA and Company Culture
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14:17 Brad's Career Path and Early Successes
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20:56 Lessons from Startups and Fractional CTO Work
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31:06 The Role of a CTO in Startups
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37:38 Conclusion and Future Episodes
Brad: You're kind of constantly behind and constantly thinking about something that you don't quite yet need.
To me, that's very exciting.
We've got this podcast we're doing,
Scott,
and people probably want to know who we are.
So tell me a little bit about yourselves. Tell the listeners about yourself,
Scott.
Scott: I would love to.
My name is Scott Porat.
I was born and raised in Seattle, Washington,
where I still live, although I lived in a few other places for little bits of time, but most of Seattle my whole life.
And I have been working doing consumer facing internet my entire career since 1995 is when I got my first job doing it. I got a job building a website for a department at the University of Washington where we both went to school and I didn't really have any plan when I graduated.
But math and computers always came naturally to me.
I didn't have any intention of getting into software or technology or anything like that.
And that came easily to me and it's continued to come easily to me. And at that time, the Internet,
you know, the Internet as we know it, the sort of commercial Internet,
the World Wide Web was just coming into being and everybody
was learning how to do it in real time.
And it was easy. I took to it naturally and I learned quickly and I just rode the wave as it happened.
And so I've been doing that with that's almost 30 years. I'm embarrassed to say how long it is. That makes me feel so old.
And I've been fortunate.
I've always I've almost always worked in early stage.
companies that are you know either at the very beginning or just recently started with the exception of what I'm doing now I've joined a company that's actually quite a few years old but other than that mostly it's early it's almost all been consumer internet a little bit of enterprise type internet stuff but mostly consumer facing and I have always gravitated towards
kind of whatever was newest and hottest and exciting that was going on I like the figuring it out part can we make it work as opposed to the when you get more into the optimization phase I don't find it quite as interesting
and so as I mentioned I've done a lot of early stage things some have been tremendous success some have been complete flops
startups that never either started or up I got had lots of ideas along the way if if I had a nickel for every folder where there's a project in there they got started oh this is a great idea we should do this and you start coding away at it but then it just clears out I would have a pile of nickels for sure and
I've just I've just did a bunch of things I started out early it was just in kind of building websites then I got into you know on online media I worked on
One of the earliest versions of ESPN.com.
I
Brad: You
Scott: worked at
Brad: were
Scott: a company
Brad: at Starwave,
Scott: called I
Brad: weren't you?
Scott: was at a company called Starwave. That's right.
Brad: Yeah.
Scott: And at that time, we were doing online media and the piece that I was doing was what we would now call content management systems. At that time, we call it automated publishing.
But figuring out how to do content management systems.
And I actually had three different companies did that. And I really enjoyed trying to figure that out.
I then went, it worked in some e-commerce.
Well,
the whole world was figuring that out during the first dot-com boom and then did sort of social media user generated content during the sort of web 2.0 boom and then got into the gig economy,
the sharing economy space.
and did that sort of during that boom and then I met you at a company called 98.6 which
Brad: During the online virtual health boom.
Scott: during the online virtual health boom during the 2020 pandemic right the COVID pandemic so did that for just a little bit I worked with you there that's the first time we worked together and as I've said to you before I felt like I found a kindred soul
amongst a sea of lost souls so it was fantastic to get to work with you and then i uh went and have since then worked two more times in gig economy businesses um so i've done three gig economy businesses i just said that really fast i should say that say gig economy businesses three times slowly so
Brad: Yeah.
Scott: uh that's what i've been doing and i miss the bitcoin boom the
The cryptocurrency thing was never for me, never resonated with me.
And at first, I was an AI skeptic, although I have started to turn around on that as I've started to figure out, I mean, not just me, but as I've started to see ways that it's being figured out how it can be used in like meaningful ways.
And so I don't know if I'll do an AI kind of startup or something like that,
but it's something that more recently has caught my attention.
I'm not an AI cheerleader yet. I'm not like all rah-rah AI,
but you definitely start to see some cool things and you start to realize,
wow,
I mean, we're in the first few pitches of the first inning with AI and this is going to be.
Maybe scary powerful.
I understand a little bit more now with the ethicists.
They call them the ethicists and people concerned about the ethics of AI we're thinking about because you can start to see how this stuff is really going to take off.
So that's been my career.
I've done some fun things.
I mentioned, you know, Healthcare 98.6 where we work together.
which didn't healthcare didn't resonate with me that much in terms of the technology side of it I should say but I've done some fun things the first time we met was a company I was working at called cheeseburger that was sort of during the web 2.0 era which was user generated content all sorts of humor and internet memes kind of things that
Brad: Yeah.
Scott: was a lot of fun
uh ESPN was a lot of fun we mentioned that earlier um and probably the biggest success I had was with a company called Rover during the gig economy time where we um you know built an online marketplace for pet care services mostly dogs but cats as well and all sorts of other funny animals there were squirrels and horses and snakes and all sorts of things people need uh pet care for but that was a fun
thing as well and what I think connects a lot of the fun stuff together is how fast they grew in every case you sort of feel like felt like I had the tail of the tiger and I was just holding on for dear life and
Brad: No way.
Scott: that is addictive actually
Brad: Yeah, it is.
That's one of the reasons startups are so fun.
Scott: Yes. Well,
it's interesting you say startups are so fun.
Startups are well suited for masochists, right? People who like to hurt themselves.
And so
I guess that's who I am.
And currently,
I am not really a startup.
I am leading the engineering team for a company called TaskRabbit.
TaskRabbit is a gig marketplace for home services.
It operates in the United States, Canada,
and Europe.
Thousands of tasks and taskers happening.
every day millions of tasks a year getting done through the platform and it's a little bit more mature of a company it's actually the oldest company I've ever worked for 15 years
is the age of the company.
I've never worked for a company more than eight years old before.
I've worked for two companies that were eight years old.
And for both of those companies,
I was there for all eight years that
Brad: Exactly.
Scott: I worked there.
So this is something new for me to come in a little bit later and help a team that
It wasn't really doing very well, and there's a lot of reasons for it around the team,
not just the people on the team, because they might hear these podcasts and I want them to know it wasn't just the team.
It might have been the team, might have not been the team.
It takes a family or a village, right?
And so much of the whole organization has to be lined up right to help engineering thrive.
Just like for a company to thrive,
engineering has to thrive.
So we're trying to help bring that team to another next level right now and grow that business as well.
And the last thing I'll say on that is an interesting thing about TaskRabbit is it's entirely owned by Ikea.
And before I worked for TaskRabbit, my wife and I have been big Ikea fans and big Ikea shoppers for a long time.
Brad: Yeah
Scott: We've learned how to navigate their stores peacefully and how to make it work for us.
We've learned a lot about their products and have thought highly of them, you know, for what they are. I mean, they're not the Rolls Royces of furniture,
but what they are.
And getting to then come inside IKEA and see that company from the inside has been really fascinating.
It is.
The best way I can describe it is a magical place.
Now, of course, I have, you know, stars in my eyes about it, but IKEA is 80 years old. It has an incredibly strong culture, an incredibly strong set of values, and it is a well-oiled machine.
Brad: My sense as an outsider is that it's super intentional and
Scott: Incredibly
Brad: that intentionality
Scott: intentional.
Brad: probably.
helps define their culture and everything about them, their values and everything.
Scott: Absolutely. It is so incredibly thoughtful how they do everything.
That has served them extremely well over the years. There's times it doesn't serve them well when the market is shifting quickly and they need to shift quick.
That doesn't help them as well.
So,
for instance,
IKEA was a little behind the ball on e-commerce.
They thought, figuratively speaking, who is going to want to buy furniture online?
Well, it turns out people buy everything online.
So they got caught playing a little bit of catch up there.
But it's really amazing to see a mature company that's developed its culture and values and like you said, thoughtfulness over the years.
And it's remarkable to see a company where people are lifers and they
buy into that culture and they create that culture and that's how you create a company like like ikea last thing i'll say about ikea ikea is also similar to patagonia owned by a not-for-profit foundation so the profits it makes goes to charitable causes which is also like very meaningful right you know often we're just working to make money for venture capitalists or investors or something like that and so it's nice to
do something where you're making something for some good for the world without us and not necessarily doing a thing that's good for the world.
That's sort of been my story.
And I'll say one last thing about my story, if I can, I didn't mention this, Brad.
In my engineering leader now,
I've done a little bit of everything.
I started out kind of as a web programmer, learned how to be a programmer.
I was an engineering manager.
I worked for three or four years as a product manager.
I like to say I've sort of done everything except for design and the whole thing because I would be a terrible designer.
I worked as a manager,
product manager. I worked in IT for a little bit while and worked in what we would now call DevOps.
technical operations and it was all those kinds of experiences I had that got me my chance but my sort of first CTO job it sort of felt like I'd done everything and was well-rounded and then I've been in engineering leadership since then with the exception of I had a six-month detour to be work in marketing
And I was terrible at it. I failed and went back to work in engineering, but I learned, I mean, I learned a lot about how marketing works.
I'll give you a whole new respect for that discipline.
And, and so I think part of what got me to where I am in my career is just having done kind of a lot of it, a lot of the different roles.
And it.
You know, as I said earlier,
this is sort of a team sport and being able to have been in a lot of the different shoes as a leader makes it easier to bring people together and bridge gaps just because I can kind of see where people are coming from.
Brad: A hundred percent.
Yeah.
Scott: That's my story.
What's your story?
Brad: I love it, Scott.
You know, it's so interesting.
You know, you and I met years and years ago back when you were at ICANN as cheeseburger and I was at revenue science. We're both CTOs at that time.
And like you said, when we worked together in 98.6, really hit it off with you. And it's so interesting to hear,
you know, you tell your story in more detail,
you know, than I think we pick up, you know, in our acquaintances and working together because.
There's so much of your path that feels similar to my path, and maybe that speaks to why we hit it off.
sort of seem to understand each other I too have basically my entire career spent in Seattle I can't claim to be born and raised in Seattle my dad was in the army so I kind of moved all over the place but I was born in Washington went to the University of Washington just like you did came out of the UW
In the late 80s and started my career at Asymmetrics, which was Paul Allen's company that he started after Microsoft,
after he left Microsoft.
Really hit the, you know, just like you with Starwave,
the internet was just starting to happen.
And in 94,
I went to a little company called Real Networks. I was like employee.
There was about 12 of us there when I started and I rode that through going public and, you know, and ultimately ended there eight years later as a VP of engineering for our systems division,
which had like some like 500 engineers in it. And we were building all the audio video codecs for streaming the early days of streaming on the Internet.
Internet.
And so I would definitely kind of that probably chalk up to one of my more like obvious successes, you know, helping helping take a company public and
Scott: Mm
Brad: growing
Scott: -hmm.
Brad: my career in that way.
After that, I kind of got my first CTO gig at Revenue Science.
That's where I was at when you and I met.
And that was another kind of example of we were really early on behavioral ad targeting.
We were one of the earliest behavioral ad targeting companies.
And we'd actually done some other really interesting stuff.
We kind of built like our own internal proprietary like no SQL database before no SQL is a thing. But we were processing about a billion transactions a day of.
of of intent data from AOL and Wall Street Journal and Kelly and we were just like munging all this stuff together into into behavioral ad targeting so that was a pretty exciting like early days of of something that now is you know commonplace in the internet you know targeting people based on the interest that they indicate
I from there I actually left there as CTO and started my own company that I learned a lot from that process.
It was one of the it was an early,
early social network focused on sort of like fitness and wellness.
Scott: I did not know that part of your biography.
Brad: yeah it didn't go anywhere that's why you don't know it because it was a it was a failure but we but we we um you know we bootstrapped up to um we you know we were doing a fair amount of like traffic but we just it was like at the dawn of the social media the web 2.0 and um we couldn't quite keep up with the the other sort of networks that were out there in that niche thing and ultimately we saw that like social networks stopped becoming niche they became like
you know, all-inclusive, kind of like the metas of the world.
And so, but it was a great learning experience, kind of wore the founder hat or the CEO hat or the CTO hat as well. And so it was just like, it was a good experience.
And for a bit after that, then I kind of put my shingle out as like a fractional CTO and worked with a ton of really interesting startups in the space where I would kind of help them build their teams up.
up um i one of those uh ultimately turned into a full-time gig where i was the cto of a company called coreo this was years after my startup but it was a similar sort of like youth sports social network type product
And then after that, I became the CTO of a company that was working in the VR space early,
early days of VR before the before the headsets existed. But the early version of the.
The DK1,
the developer kit one by Oculus before Meta bought them was starting to be out in prototype form and we built a software platform that was basically a metaverse software platform.
So that was that was a pretty exciting time and that was another company where it was, you know, I got to.
pivot from just being the cto running large teams to you know writing code again hands-on code um that was a lot of fun that project um i did that for
I think almost eight years, actually, and then and then left for a bit, did a little sabbatical, kind of went into the mountains, became a ski patroller, spent spent the year of COVID actually in the outdoors and avoiding small spaces and people breathing on me.
And and then and then I.
basically ran into you at 98.6 kind of left the left the mountains and joined 98.6 during their massive growth phase and and you and I kind of reacquainted ourselves with each other and got to work together that was a lot of fun I think that you know I I kind of like you I think that health care is a really tough space and I think that
And I took it on because I kind of love taking on challenges and learning new things, you know, just like going into VR was a thing that I'd always wanted to do computer graphics, but I hadn't really done a lot of computer graphics. So that was kind of I was drawn into that space.
Um,
and the being pulled into healthcare kind of was like, oh,
this seems really important.
Maybe I should, you know, go jump into that into the fray there.
But you're right, it was very, I mean, at least for me, it was it was
a difficult space to work in.
But I enjoyed the time there.
And I think that I walked away from that with a lot of really interesting lessons about how cultures impact.
uh team efficiency and how how easy it is for um good ideas that seem good on paper to sort of actually make things more challenging for a team to be high performance and so there's so I think that's kind of what I felt like I learned a lot from that experience from there after I left that I kind of went back to the fractional CTO work and uh
About a year and a half ago, got really, really busy again with another company actually,
interestingly enough,
is actually high fidelity again,
but they kind of wound down and stopped doing the VR stuff and they started up a new project in remote work. And we're in the early stages now at pre MVP of a really interesting tool that
You know, we've done a couple of pilots with customers, but it's a tool that basically encourages collaboration and connection with remote teams. And it's just something that I'm really passionate about because for eight years before the pandemic when I was at.
High Fidelity, the VR company,
we were a fully remote team.
And so I'm a big believer in the power of remote teams and being able to tap into talent,
no matter where they happen to be,
so long as you can develop systems, processes and culture that can.
uh,
facilitate and really, uh, allow those team members to shine.
Um,
yeah,
so that's kind of my, my career trajectory.
It's always been in the startup space.
I love the startup space.
I love the fact that you get to wear so many hats.
You get to,
um,
You constantly are facing new and unique challenges.
Those challenges can be anything from technical challenges like how are we going to solve this problem of streaming video over 28.8 modems, you know, those early technical challenges like that to, you know, even simple things like, well, how do you how do you design a culture of quality?
somebody in a small team in a new team how do you how do you like you know maybe you've got a bunch of junior engineers that haven't don't have a ton of experience and you're trying to help them understand how to shape their their work processes and their style and their culture so that they kind of build quality in and speed in and you know kind of constantly balancing the the golden triangle that we talk about and so
It's it's it's super fun.
I can't I mean, the largest company I ever worked for and the oldest company I ever worked for was Real Networks. When when I left there, I'd been there for eight years and they were, you know, like maybe eighteen hundred employees at that point when I left.
But I'm so I've been in the big company, but I am almost always in the in the, you know, somewhere between the 10 to 100.
And that that space is a lot of fun. You still can know everybody.
You can still, you know, you know, you get to really understand everybody's personalities and you can kind of develop.
leadership styles that allow you to really um get the most out of everybody by really sort of knowing them and letting and knowing their them how they how their what their authentic self is so that you can really kind of leverage that and tap into that i think i think that's just so much i get a lot of joy out of that you know that process so
Scott: I'm going to ask you a question.
Brad: Absolutely.
Scott: You had mentioned you've done some.
interim CTO types of things maybe some coaching advising things
Brad: Yeah.
Scott: along the way are you still doing that are you totally focused now on this new project
Brad: It's so funny you asked me that I've got I've gotten recently several people have reached out to me. I literally was driving to the mountain over the weekend and got a call from somebody who's like,
here's my problem.
Can you come in and help?
And so I am pretty busy with my current project, but I.
But I love helping other folks out. So I definitely do advisory stuff for folks.
I've there's a handful of different entrepreneurs that know me from my past that when they start kicking up new things, especially like I had when I was when I was really doing that more actively,
you know, I feel like my specialty was entrepreneurs who weren't necessarily technical themselves,
like they had, you know, kind of tech, they worked in tech companies, but they were either on the sales product.
product or marketing side of things and they had this idea and they would come to me because they knew they worked with me in the past and they knew my my skills and they would say like how do I make this happen how do I build this thing you know and in fact the team that I'm working with most recently you know the team I'm working on now like founder reached out to me and he basically had an idea that was going to leverage some of the assets that they had from the early VR days and
it was basically a kind of a back of the envelope i have this idea how do i how do i get started you know and um that's that's a lot of fun you know like being able to bring your skill as a as a technologist you know like we're we're so i think one of the things that sort of most technologists like you and i are really good at sort of like
putting the puzzle together right like you've got you've got this idea of what you want to build
here's how we can build let's let's let's step it this way this way this this this right we can we can step it together and we can make progress pretty quickly on on implementing an idea and that's a lot of a lot of joy so yeah i i still do some advising um a little bit of um uh you know
I don't have multiple currently. I'm not doing multiple fractional CTO stuff because I'm pretty busy on this project.
But yeah,
I'm taking on a love talking to other people and helping helping get their project rolling and then, you know, see where it takes it.
Scott: Yeah, I always feel like I have a little bit of a pay it forward obligation when I was early in my career.
So many people either just through replying to an email or taking a phone call or meeting for a coffee helped me out.
I can't always do it because life is busy,
but as much as I can, I try to help out.
At the moment,
you know, I just have one, I've done all these things as well.
I have one coaching client right now and a CEO is also the CTO of their company.
That's pretty interesting.
And I'm actually an advisor to a not-tech company.
To
Brad: Oh,
Scott: company in the grocery space,
which is interesting.
Brad: nice.
Scott: Oh,
it's interesting because you start to learn that a lot of these non-tech companies have a lot of technology in them,
which
Brad: Yeah.
Scott: is pretty interesting.
I've been noticing that lately with like in airports and hospitals,
like just the amount of technology in those facilities is just kind of mind blowing when you start to look at it.
and airlines.
So that's been interesting to be involved with.
It's a startup,
it's a younger company, a company that's trying to get off the ground.
So I've been able to bring that experience to help them out and then bring some technology experience,
but more on the how do you get something started side.
Brad: I was going to say the other thing that happened, I'm curious if you've run into this sort of thing. I know I've got this happens to me often when I have.
non-tech founders who reach out to me and I start chatting with them one of the things that I feel like I enjoy doing and I think happens often is being that translator between the non-technical product owner non-technical founder and helping them
understand what if they have a team maybe they're working with some sort of like uh outsource team to build a prototype or something like that you know you and i talk about this that notion of kind of being the the rosetta stone the translator and it's so interesting how common those themes are um the last couple um advisory um
uh projects that i did was a lot leaning into a lot of that like helping you know kind of vet you're hearing this from your outsource tech team let me translate that for you here's here's what they're trying to say to you you know here's here's here's what you should ask them for clarifying questions for
Scott: That on that second point,
yeah,
I think a theme of something I've talked to a lot of people about.
non-technical folks is here's how you manage your engineering team like this is what you need to be asking for from them so that they're doing the thing that you want them to do
um because often that non-technical person just has kind of a vision in their head for the app or the website or wherever they want but that actually to say like okay i want a demo every week i want a list i want a road map and a demo whatever the pieces are that you do we don't need to go into it here but uh that is helpful to them yeah so i i don't know i've done more and i've dialed up uh the you know the coaching and advising and
I've done some fractional stuff along the way has gone up and down over the years.
In the last two years, it's been on the down slope.
I think in the next four years, it's going to start to go on the up slope.
Brad: Yeah
Scott: I just got some energy back.
So I have that, you know, I had to recharge, you have to recharge. And I had some time to do that.
I've always had this idea that I wanted to do. It's actually part of what spawned this podcast, really.
I call it CTO school.
Brad: Yeah.
Scott: You mentioned a non-technical co-founder trying to find or work with that engineering leader,
find an engineering leader is very, very hard.
The other side of the coin is to go from software engineer or software engineering team manager to startup CTO is a whole different follow axis. And I feel fortunate.
As I mentioned earlier,
I had all these different experiences.
I also went to business school and so like I just had this kind of like mosaic of experiences for lack of a better word.
that kind of put me in a good spot to be able to do that sort of startup CTO thing and I've always thought man there needs to be a class on this thing like hey I'm a I'm a engineering director somewhere or a software engineering manager or maybe I want to start my own company and like it's about so much more than building the software like that's maybe what do you think
40% of it, maybe 60% at the most,
right?
Brad: It's funny.
What I was going to say is that it's this really interesting balance where it's probably all it's almost all about building the software until it's very much not all about building the software.
Right.
And it's like you have to it's that's one of the things that's so exciting about startups is that.
It's that you're constantly asking yourself,
am I ready yet to do dot, dot, dot? And that dot, dot, dot might be grow the team.
Okay,
if you're growing the team, then how are you selecting the best candidates?
How are you measuring their performance?
Oh, I'm writing this code really fast and am I about ready to dot, dot, dot?
And it's...
figure out do you need layers of management do you need engineering managers do you need and if you have engineering managers then how do you select those engineering managers and how do you how do you manage them and what kind of processes start getting put in place around that right and the and the the thing that's so exciting about the zero to one is you're kind of constantly
behind and constantly thinking about something that you don't quite yet need and
Scott: Mm-hmm.
Brad: that
Scott: Yeah.
Brad: that inflection point of when you didn't quite need it yet and then all of a sudden you tip over and now you needed it last last month is just this exciting dance of to me that's very exciting
Scott: There's one more piece that you didn't mention.
My take is that the moment you become the senior most engineering person in your business,
and it could be a business of one,
or it could be just you.
But when you're that person,
you're actually,
this is the key thing, I think, you have to recognize.
You're actually more businessman than engineer,
business person than engineer.
Brad: Yep.
Yeah,
you're more 100%.
Scott: You've become a suit, as they say, right? You're no longer the talent, you're the suits.
And once I got my own head around that.
It actually made working with the business people way easier,
not because I came became one of them, but because I understood what they were trying to accomplish,
which
Brad: Yep.
Scott: is like whatever it was. Right.
So it allowed me it made me realize that as an engineering leader,
you are at the same time like quantum.
physics whatever you're wearing two hats you're wearing a business hat and an engineer hat and it's not like you toggle between one and the other but you're like both at the same time always I actually sometimes wonder if like marketing people feel that way too right they simultaneously have to like think about the creative that's getting built in the campaign and the concepts and whatever marketing people talk about you
and its optimization and its spend and its cost and those things and the output of it all at once at the same time.
I wonder if the marketing folks feel that way also.
Brad: Yeah, I get it. I 100% agree with that. And I think that I have been so fortunate in my career that.
You know,
early on, I got to witness that so up close and personal at Real Networks where there was just so few of us and Rob,
the founder of that company was so, so engaged and so passionate and so he was.
very strong business person and a very strong technical leader he had a vision for what he wanted he understood what he wanted from a product you know and it was great to watch and to learn in that sort of
crucible it was so such a intense environment and I have you know my colleagues that I have from those days you know we're still friends and it's so it's like such deep bonds because I think we all were learning so much so quickly in such an intense environment
And but,
you know, it's like to your point about like understanding the vision of the business person,
understanding, having empathy essentially for the business part and not just being the developer.
I think that's one of the things that is more accessible for developers that are part of startups when they're smaller.
Because hopefully they're seeing each other,
they're seeing their business owners,
you know, in the same room,
the same virtual room, in the same space,
in the same meeting.
And that helps make that pivot for those that want to move into leadership,
engineering leadership,
right?
uh makes that pivot of like you're not just an engineer you've got to be the steward of the business too
Scott: Well, I feel like we have many episodes. We could do a whole series on making the pivot.
Brad: Making
Scott: how
Brad: the pivot.
Scott: to get that whole CTO school concept I sort of talked about.
I'm going to discuss that some other time. I've got a whole idea about it. Maybe we can make it come to life on this podcast.
Brad,
it's been fun.
We didn't talk about skiing once today in our podcast. We stayed focused.
Brad: Pray for snow.
This episode of How Many CTOs Does It Take podcast was edited by Saffron Epigal.
Our theme song was AI generated by Brad.
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