alphalist.CTO Podcast - For CTOs and Technical Leaders

Rebecca Murphey, Field CTO at Swarmia and co-author of "Build: Elements of an Effective Software Organization," shares her insights from her roles at Stripe and Indeed. She discusses aligning engineering work with business outcomes and the significance of developer experience. Topics include using queuing theory to evaluate workflows, the ethical implications of tracking developer metrics, and the balance between immediate optimization and future consequences. Rebecca emphasizes the need for effective communication and the importance of team metrics over individual ones.

Claire Fautsch, CTO at Joblift, shares her expertise in cloud cost optimization. She reveals how Joblift reduced its monthly cloud expenses from €100K to €30K without sacrificing performance. Claire discusses building effective dashboards and aligning cloud costs with business KPIs. She emphasizes the importance of involving the entire team in cost management, avoiding over-provisioning, and making impactful technical tweaks. The conversation also touches on cultivating cost sensitivity within tech teams and maintaining financial efficiency without a dedicated FinOps team.

How DevOps has Changed QA Keep an eye on the latest trends in this CTO podcast episode featuring Hannes Lenke (CEO and Co-founder of Checkly). Hannes shares insights from over a decade of shaping the testing and monitoring landscape. From AI-powered mobile testing to cloud-based browser testing to synthetic monitoring, he has seen it all. Listen to find out: 👀 What is "Monitoring as Code"? How does it differ from traditional observability? 🔄 Has DevOps changed QA forever? Is there still a place for dedicated QA teams in an automated world? 🚀 How did Checkly evolve into a PLG company with a sales team? ⚙️ How do they run customer code at scale across 21 global data centers? Listen here BROUGHT TO YOU BY SmartRecruiters Timestamps (00:00) – Introduction to Alphalist Podcast (02:05) – Meet Hannes Lenke (05:13) – Hiring the Right People (07:50) – Hannes’s Journey into Computing (12:30) – TestObject: AI for Mobile Testing in the Early 2010s (16:33) – Globalizing a Berlin-Based Business (21:01) – The Birth of Checkly and Monitoring as Code (23:00) – How DevOps Changed QA (30:52) – The Right Observability Stack for SaaS (37:39) – Cross-Functional Teams vs. Dedicated QA (43:10) – Challenges of Executing Customer Code at Scale (49:08) – How Teams are Arranged at Checkly (50:51) – PLG with Enterprise Sales (53:52) – Lessons Learned as a Second-Time Founder: Pace Yourself About Hannes Lenke Hannes is the co-founder of Checkly. former CEO and Founder of TestObject and General Manager EMEA Sauce Labs. Addicted to devops and passionate about all things tech. About our sponsor SmartRecruiters Want to make recruiting more efficient with AI? Smart Recruiters offers a comprehensive global recruiting solution. They cover applicant management, CRM, talent onboarding, CMS, and reporting. Fossway calls it "the leading platform for talent acquisition." Use their AI-driven solution for active sourcing and candidate selection. Smart Recruiters helps you identify top talent in internal and external databases, providing detailed applicant analysis with weighted matching and scoring. Their AI system also recommends suitable positions for new applicants and improves through user feedback. It ensures bias-free, objective analysis and compliant operations worldwide, supporting over 4,000 companies, including LinkedIn, Visa, Bosch, Axel Springer, and SIXT. Their platform is highly rated by recruiters, hiring managers, and candidates for its intuitive design and easy integration. Ready to elevate your recruiting process? Visit the Smart Recruiters website for free resources on AI and recruiting trends. Book a free consultation and mention the alphalist.CTO podcast for a 10% discount. Just go to: https://link.alphalist.com/smartrecruiters QUOTE: "As a second-time founder, you always think it's so much easier to fall into a second business. I think it's not… the expectations are just larger."

Tuomas Artman, CTO of Linear, emphasizes the value of sustainable business growth over hypergrowth. He shares insights on maintaining product quality without expanding teams and the risks of feature bloat in customer-driven development. Artman discusses the advantages of prioritizing longevity over early acquisitions and reveals why Linear raised funds after initially planning to bootstrap. He also addresses why Full-Stack Engineers are preferred over QA Teams and the unique benefits of a local-first synchronization engine for a seamless user experience.

Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir Technologies, is shaking up the backend with innovative strategies derived from overseeing 150 independent development teams. He shares fascinating insights linking French restaurant management to engineer-led sales approaches. The conversation dives into the distinction between 'artists' and 'hackers' in engineering, while also addressing the importance of data-driven decisions and the power of meritocracy in tech. Shyam advocates for reducing information asymmetry, ensuring diversity and creativity thrive in organizations.

Sabrina Farmer, CTO at GitLab and a tech veteran with 19 years at Google, dives into the evolving landscape of DevSecOps and AI in developer workflows. She discusses GitLab's CEO Challenge to drive innovation while automating outdated processes. Sabrina sheds light on how to cultivate trust and accountability in remote teams through open documentation and personal 'read me' documents. Additionally, she explores using AI to enhance learning moments and making strategic thinking more accessible for developers.

Independent. Direct. Security First Discover the benefits of end-to-end technical independence with Alexander Matthey, CTO of Adyen. Learn why Adyen cherishes its in-house strategy as Alexander shares how Adyen’s extreme technical independence (no third-party vendors) enables efficiency in everything from libraries to security. Listen to find out: Security First: How Adyen makes security a priority for everyone. 🔒 Pick Up the Phone📞: How direct communication makes them more efficient. How Adyen’s long-term vision drives innovation. 🚀 How Conway’s Law is applied to their team structure Listen here Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction to the Alphalist Podcast (00:44) Meet Alexander Matthey, CTO of Adyen (01:34) Adyen's Founding and Growth (02:47) Alex's Nerd Journey (05:42) Transition from Coding to Leadership (07:28) How GenAI is changing coding (10:52) Life in the FinTech space (15:04) How Adyen's Long-Term Vision Drives Innovation (18:12) End-to-End Independence. No third-party vendors. (20:39) Product Discovery - Start with Customer (22:49) How industry has changed (23:43) Adyen Tech Strategy: Have set languages/tools etc. (27:24) Adyen Tech Stack (27:50) Adyen's Organisational Structure & Conway's Law (28:28) -Biggest Concentration on Payments (29:35) -Teams powering Financial Services (30:39) -Data and Platform Engineering (31:48) Transitioning to Smaller Teams (33:06) Starting from Scratch: Building a Payment System not in 100% private cloud (35:33) The Adyen Formula: Direct Communication via Phone (42:13) Security First: Internal Responsibility (46:16) Tools and Monitoring for Security (49:57) Security if start from scratch (54:07) Advice to My Younger Self

David Cramer, Co-founder + CPO at Sentry, discusses evolving roles in tech, devtool marketing, monetizing open source, branding impact, self-serve model success, team dynamics, work-life balance, and career evolution in an engaging CTO podcast.

Platform Engineering: Modularised, Standardised and Automated. Discover how to leverage platform engineering 🏗️ for convenience, standardization, automation, and reduced cloud costs in this CTO podcast featuring Boyan Dimitrov (CTO @ SIXT). SIXT is a leading global mobility provider serving customers in over 100 countries worldwide. With 800 tech employees globally, they have spent the past eight years standardizing and modularizing their tech stack to achieve unparalleled scalability. Listen to find out: How to apply the 80:20 rule to Platform ⚖️ How to automate 🔄infrastructure without tickets 🎟️ How to reduce cloud costs ☁️with Platform Engineering How to evaluate ⚖️ an IDP Why they standardize hosting (cloud and database) 🗄️ Open Souce vs. Proprietary - Build vs. Buy Listen here BROUGHT TO YOU BY Storyblok Timestamps: (1:16) Intro (1:21) Introduction to the Alphalist Podcast (1:39) Meet Boyan Dimitrov: CTO of SIXT (2:32) Boyan’s Nerd Journey Journey in Tech (8:42) SIXT’s Tech Stack: From Legacy to Modern (12:21) Microservice vs. Monolith vs. Midsized System (15:30) Platform Engineering (17:41) Platform Mindset (18:18) Modularisation, 80:20 rule and bets on tech trends (19:53) Example: DevOps (23:43) Automations that set up projects (26:40) Size of Platform Team (28:46) Open Source Build or buy (30:28) How to Manage Cloud Costs (31:19) Cost Savings of Cloud Native (31:59) Link Cost To Execution (32:36) Using Platform to abstract tech and allow engineers to focus on customers (36:12) Automating infrastructure - without tickets (38:26) Using Crossplane (39:56) Standardising Cloud Services (40:15) Standardising Database (42:25) Evaluating Proprietary Platforms for IDP (44:25) Optimizing Cloud Costs and Performance (45:20) Constantly improving IDP with inspiration (46:48) Leveraging AI for Development - in a standardised way (47:48) Fast Set Up for Internal Customers (49:41) Internal Application -Supporting the Back Office with AI and Low-Code (52:16) What is next for their IDP and Platform Engineering (52:59) Cool things Sixt is working on (56:33) Tooling for Company Communications (59:06) "Guilds": Creating Communities to Prevent Silos (1:02:28) Balancing Business and Technology (1:04:11) Focus Time (1:06:39) Time Machine: Message to Younger Self About Boyan Boyan Dimitrov is Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of SIXT, responsible for the company’s tech vision and strategy. He oversees the SIXT Engineering Hubs in Munich, Bangalore, Kiev, and Lisbon.Prior to joining SIXT in 2015, Boyan had a long career in the startup ecosystems in the UK and Bulgaria. In his last position, he led the platform teams at Hailo in London, where he worked on a global microservices platform in the mobility space. With over 15 years of experience in cloud and distributed systems, Boyan is a frequent speaker at tech conferences around the world. He holds a bachelor’s degree in network technologies and an MSc degree in IT project management from Aston University in Birmingham. About our Sponsor# Storyblok Finally, a headless CMS that works for both developers and business users. Storyblok offers a combination of visual editing tools and highly customizable content blocks. This is built on modern headless architecture that gives developers the flexibility to build fast and reliable digital platforms. The big benefit of headless CMS is that content can be streamed to any platform via API without having to manage the content multiple times. For example, customers use Storyblok for their websites, online stores, apps, or send the same content to Twitter, WeChat or Alexa skills. Storyblok is now used by over 50,000 developers, product owners and managers in over 80,000 projects in 130 countries. Customers include Adidas, Marley Spoon, Deliveroo and more.

Transformative AI, Build/Buy AI, Business Opportunities and more Get ready for the AI industrial revolution 🦸 in this CTO podcast episode featuring a roundtable of AI AllStars! So much is happening in AI, and you want to be part of it - that is why we asked Jonas Andrulis (Founder and CEO of Aleph Alpha), Rasmus Rothe (Co-founder of Merantix and its AI Campus) and Johannes Schaback (CTO of SumUp) to share with us a broad overview of what CTOs need to know about upcoming AI revolution. Turns out, we aren’t waiting for AGI - we are working on Transformative AI which is in reach for us all. Ready to transform lives with AI? Listen to find out: ~~AGI~~ Transformative AI by 2030 🤖 Why your AI strategy (USP💎) matters more than model choice How to balance AI R&D 🎓with Product 💥and Enterprise Sales 💸 AI Models: Build⚒️/Buy🛒/Pivot 🧭 What are emerging opportunities in AI? (Spoiler: B2B SaaS especially in manufacturing 🏭) How to champion AI 🦸 in your company Loonshots🚀: how to cultivate innovation + Hack to attract 🧲 AI talent to non-tech hubs Listen here BROUGHT TO YOU BY Storyblok Timestamps: (00:00) Welcome (03:39) Meet the AI All Stars (04:31) AGI VS. TRANSFORMATIVE AI (05:28) What to expect in Transformative AI before 2030 (05:53) Agents and Scaling Limits of LLMs (07:07) The Joy of Unsupervised Learning (09:33) The Growing Pains of All AI Applications (10:38) Move to Smaller Models (11:13) RAG Combined with Proprietary Data (12:11) THE ROLE OF TRAINING DATA (14:06) Dreamer Model Architecture (15:25) Synthetic Data (16:49) Where foundational models excel (18:00) AI Sovereignty and Build/Buy/Pivot (20:18) AI Strategy (USP) is more important than model choice (20:29) Example: Detecting contradictory statements using explainable AI with positive and negative sources (22:53) Risk of Vendor Lock-In and Data Breach (25:23) Why companies are pursuing Multicloud in fear of being 'milked' (26:25) BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES IN AI (26:25) 1. Customising Models (28:59) 2. Vertical AI business for industry-specific solutions (30:37) Message for B2B SaaS (31:36) The New Pricing Paradigm Created by AI Products (32:01) Attracting AI Talent (33:38) Investors as Partners First (35:14) Keeping one's ego in check as CEO (36:49) Rasmus's 5-year plan (37:51) What is the Merantix AI Campus (39:31) Hiring The Right Fit AI Researchers (41:22) Balancing AI R&D + Product + Enterprise Sales (42:35) Pivoting an AI-Driven Product (46:10) LOONSHOT: CULTIVATING INNOVATION (46:45) The Challenge of a Loonshot Team on Company Culture (50:18) Loonshot: Can ideas come when isolated from customers? (50:51) Pitching to the Innovation Board at Aleph Alpha (51:39) COMPANY BUYIN: Guiding Companies Through AI Transformation (55:10) How can CTOs get the rest of the company board AI (56:31) Encourage people to try things out (56:57) The Role of the In-House Champion for AI (57:35) 3 Levels AI Company Maturity (58:47) Position your Team to Lead the Next Industrial Revolution (59:28) Bottom Up and Top Down About our Guests# Jonas Andrulis Jonas Andrulis is founder and CEO of the German startup Aleph Alpha, with which he has set the German deep-tech funding record since its founding in 2019. He completed his industrial engineering studies at KIT in Karlsruhe, Germany, with a focus on artificial intelligence and modeling. As a serial entrepreneur, prior to Aleph Alpha, he first founded an AI software company for planning and optimization of complex logistics problems, then for human-in-the-loop training and validation of deep learning algorithms for human-machine interactions. As of 2016, he was at Apple leading AI research in the Special Projects Group. With Aleph Alpha, Jonas aims to build an independent European alternative for the next generation of artificial intelligence, following the example of OpenAI and DeepMind. Rasmus Rothe Dr. Rasmus Rothe is the co-founder and CTO of Merantix, the leading AI group in Europe. He serves as a General Partner of Merantix's venture arm, which builds and invests in AI companies. Merantix also operates an AI solutions business, Merantix Momentum, and oversees the largest AI ecosystem in Europe, including the AI Campus in Berlin and AI House Davos at the World Economic Forum. Rasmus received his Ph.D from ETH Zurich and is a renowned deep learning researcher. He serves as a founding board member of the German AI Association. Johannes Schaback Johannes Schaback is an accomplished entrepreneur and technology executive with extensive experience in the Berlin tech scene. He earned a degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Berlin and Shanghai Jiao Tong University before joining Rocket Internet as a Software Engineer in 2008. Schaback co-founded LadenZeile.de in 2009, utilizing AI extensively to build the visual eCommerce platform, which was acquired by Axel Springer in 2011. He became a business angel in 2015, and in 2018, joined the management board of online furniture store, home24. Currently, Schaback is the Chief Technology Officer of SumUp, a global financial technology company, leading the development of their cutting-edge payment processing solutions. About our Sponsor# Storyblok Finally, a headless CMS that works for both developers and business users. Storyblok offers a combination of visual editing tools and highly customizable content blocks. This is built on modern headless architecture that gives developers the flexibility to build fast and reliable digital platforms. The big benefit of headless CMS is that content can be streamed to any platform via API without having to manage the content multiple times. For example, customers use Storyblok for their websites, online stores, apps, or send the same content to Twitter, WeChat or Alexa skills. Storyblok is now used by over 50,000 developers, product owners and managers in over 80,000 projects in 130 countries. Customers include Adidas, Marley Spoon, Deliveroo and more.