How to Become a Startup VPE with Martin Casado, General Partner @ Andreessen Horowitz & Sonal Chokshi, Editor in Chief @ Andreessen Horowitz #22

Martin Casado and Sonal Chokshi explore what makes a great VP of Engineering at startups! You’ll hear how successful VPEs are evaluated, the ideal experience and success criteria. You’ll hear rapid-fire responses covering how to scale yourself, KPIs, the ideal VPE hiring time for startups, and what VPEs should definitely NOT do.

MARTIN CASADO, GENERAL PARTNER @ ANDREESSEN HOROWITZ

He was previously cofounder and CTOr at Nicira (acquired by VMware for $1.26 billion). At VMware, Martin was SVP & GM of the Networking and Security Business Unit (which he scaled to a $600 million run-rate). Martin’s early career was at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory working on large-scale simulations for the Department of Defense, networking, and cybersecurity.

He holds both a PhD and Masters degree in Computer Science from Stanford University, where he created the software-defined networking (SDN) movement and cofounded Illuminics Systems (acquired by Quova). He’s been awarded both the ACM Grace Murray Hopper award and the NEC C&C award, and he’s an inductee of the Lawrence Livermore Lab’s Entrepreneur’s Hall of Fame. Martin serves on the board of: ActionIQ, Astranis, DeepMap, Imply, Kong, Pindrop Security, RapidAPI, SigOpt, and Yubico.

“In my experience over a number of engineering leaders is whether or not they're a good engineer is totally orthogonal to the actual role. And in fact, someone that's deeply passionate about a particular architecture technology or approach can be very damaging because you have a power asymmetry in the team.” - Martin Casado

SONAL CHOKSHI, EDITOR IN CHIEF @ ANDREESSEN HOROWITZ AKA "a16z"

Sonal built and oversees all of Andreessen Horowitz’s editorial operations, including showrunning and hosting the a16z Podcast, leading production of the a16z Crypto Canon; and more. Prior to a16z Sonal was a Senior Editor at Wired. Prior to that, Sonal was responsible for content and community at Xerox PARC. Before moving back to California from NYC, Sonal was doing graduate work in developmental and cognitive psychology at Columbia University's school of education and worked as a researcher "ethnographer" on NSF grants around teacher professional development and early numeracy. She studied English and Psychology at UCLA.

SHOWNOTES

• Hiring misconceptions & Why VPs of Engineering are so valuable (4:21)
• Ideal experience and success criteria for a Startup VPE (8:45)
• Does a VPE need to be a good engineer? (10:56)
• Two key areas VPEs are evaluated (13:01)
• How to balance product and engineering as a VPE (17:34)
• The hard issue of managing people (19:54)
• Why engineering analytics and conscious decisions are important to building great engineering orgs (22:24)
• Good KPIs and how to scale yourself as a VPE (24:19)
• When is the right time to become a VPE at a startup? (26:25)
• What a VPE should NOT do (27:44)
• What is a CTO’s role and how do you work with them as a VPE? (31:00)
• Takeaways (32:0)

LINKS

a16z Podcast