
alphalist.CTO Podcast - For CTOs and Technical Leaders
This podcast features interviews of CTOs and other technical leadership figures and topics range from technology (AI, blockchain, cyber, DevOps, Web Architecture, etc.) to management (e.g. scaling, structuring teams, mentoring, technical recruiting, product etc.).
Guests from leading tech companies share their best practices and knowledge.
The goal is to support other CTOs on their journey through tech and engineering, inspire and allow a sneak-peek into other successful companies to understand how they think and act. Get awesome insights into the world‘s top tech companies, personalities with this podcast brought to you by Tobias Schlottke.
Latest episodes

Nov 5, 2020 • 46min
#13 Matthias Laug // CTO & Co-Founder at TIER mobility
Podcast time! This time I have the chance to talk to the judo brown belt owning CTO of the scooter& mobility startup TIER mobility Matthias Laug.
Before TIER he co-founded Lieferando and boy, he's a nice guest to talk to.
We spoke about:
* Why he puts people over tech
* What they use to run their large IoT stack
* His vision of Scooters talking to each other in a huge mesh
* Why he after founding Lieferando and having a large exit still started at Thoughtworks
* When to not do backflips even if you perfected doing them
He also briefly mentions Eric Bowman, Martin Fowler and Pat Kua who have one thing in common: I did not interview them for the alphalist podcast - Would be happy to chat with you guys too! :)

Oct 22, 2020 • 55min
#12 with Johannes Schaback // CTO at Home24
This time I am talking to my friend Johannes Schaback, CTO of Home24, who is also originally a co-founder of alphalist and
one of the brightest minds in the German engineering, tech and business-tech scene.
We are talking about his journey through the AI and data world, the Do's and Don'ts and the real world, no bullshit application of machine learning.
We are Tackle:
* Data is the new oil - wrong or right?
* The machine learning models @ Home24
* How ML-infrastructure evolved in the last decade
* The necessity to spend more time in the problem space before entering the solution space
We talk about mentorship and great people he learned from (*ping* Marc Appelhoff, Brigitte Wittekind, Christian Weiss, Philipp Kreibohm ;-)).
Thanks a lot Johannes and looking forward to track your successes at Home24, your career and investments.

Oct 8, 2020 • 48min
#11 with Ahti Heinla // Co-founder & CTO at Starship Technologies
In this podcast, it's all about complicated things and my guest masters them all: IoT, Robotics, AI and customer acquisition.
Ahti Heinla is former founding engineer of Skype and now runs Starship Technologies as Founder and CTO.
In this podcast we talk about
Robotics as the coolest thing to build as an engineer
How I stopped one of his Robots in Hamburg
The hard things about robots 🤖
The hard things about bringing ML models to production
Thanks again Ahti for being my guest and looking forward to see more and more of your robots in the wild. Great to see so much innovation coming from Estonia.
Looking forward to feedback and guest proposals.

Sep 17, 2020 • 46min
#10 with Marty Cagan // Partner at Silicon Valley Product Group
Marty Cagan, inventor of product discovery and partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, discusses misconceptions about Agile, resource waste in modern organizations, product discovery and user testing, and the balance between autonomy and empowerment in product teams. The podcast also compares the approaches of Apple and Google to product management, reflects on the birth of the internet industry, and shares experiences from Marty's time at Netscape.

Sep 3, 2020 • 49min
Christian Hardenberg // CTO Delivery Hero
How to scale an Engineering Team and more
I spoke to Christian Hardenberg, CTO of Delivery Hero 🍔 and formerly Rocket Internet 🚀 on how to scale an engineering org from 200 to 2000 people.
Delivery Hero just entered the DAX a week ago and is worth almost 20 BN as of today.
He shared his perspective and thoughts on:
How to measure software developers at scale
How they keep up the pace / velocity
What he thinks about OKRs
How they manage to integrate all the acquired entities and teams
Their secret sauce and why he thinks it is better than Google

Aug 20, 2020 • 1h 4min
Peter Großkopf // CTO Börse Stuttgart Digital Exchange
This time, I have the honor to talk to Peter Grosskopf, CTO of Börse Stuttgart digital exchange and former CTO of Solarisbank.
He's an amazing guy for philosophical discussions around finance, tech and we share one love that is no longer as cool as it was in the 00's: Ruby on rails!
This time we discuss:1
How he made regulations his hobby 👓 and wants developers to feel like working for Spotify or Soundcloud even with regulations in place
The do's and don'ts in Fintech
Why he rather picks mature stacks (aka Postgres and Ruby on rails) against the "new kids on the block"
How he thinks about new things tech like Apache Kafka

Aug 6, 2020 • 59min
Sergei Anikin // CTO Pipedrive
How to scale a SaaS product
I had the chance to interview Sergei Anikin about how to scale a SaaS product. Sergei Anikin comes with vast experience in “large scale tech” as he was with Skype when it was sold 3 times (eBay, Private Equity, Microsoft) and is CTO at 90-million funded Pipedrive (CRM SaaS) now.
Laser-sharp focus on the essential features
“Scaling problems are good problems to have”
Microservices vs. Monoliths
Team structure at scale: Missions and Tribes
How they do M&A and post merger integration

Jul 23, 2020 • 1h 3min
Mikko Hyppönen // F-Secure
I had to deal with cybersecurity topics recently; I've even been in touch with the FBI 👮. On this occasion I invited a brilliant guest for the alphalist Podcast: It’s Mikko Hyppönen, a computer security specialist and scientific director at the security company F-Secure.
He spent half of his life hacking and chasing hackers and he knows how to talk about it: I saw at least 3 TED Talks by him and yes, they are very entertaining and helpful.
Key topics in the Podcast are:
The recent Twitter hack and the stupidness of the hackers
How cybersecurity evolved and became a required skill for companies and countries
His recommendations for modern mid sized companies around Cybersecurity (Where to start with processes, recruiting, tools, budgets)
What to do if you’ve been compromised

Jul 9, 2020 • 1h 21min
Sebastian Thrun // Google X
AI and software world, Stanford vs. TU-Munich, Udacity\ and why Germany is a Car Nation
He is a Stanford professor, founder of Google X, built the first self driving car, won the Darpa-Award for it, started the online-academy Udacity and is now building autonomous planes at Kitty Hawk. Wow.
Can you tell why I highly admire him and how excited I was when I won him for my podcast?
We talked about the car nation in Germany, how competitive we are in the AI and software world, Stanford vs. TU-Munich, why Sebastian is striving for a brain-computer interface, why he has built the leading online university Udacity and how to tackle machine learning as a modern CTO.
He also explains why he eventually comes up with a Bluetooth-connected Smart-Bra next.

Jun 25, 2020 • 60min
Daniel Gebler // CTO Picnic
Daniel Gebler, the CTO of Picnic, discusses building an app-only E-Commerce platform. They talk about Picnic's secret sauce in data science, supply chain, and fulfillment. They also cover the company's explosive growth during the pandemic and Daniel's thoughts on Microservices.