CTO School

Scaling technology teams from 1 to 30+

  • December 10, 2012 · 6:30 PM

  • This location is shown only to members

TL;DR:

1. Joaquin Roca talk on Team Dynamics.  Joaquin has a Ph.D. in Social-Organizational Psychology and helps companies scale human systems (1hr)

2. Open forum to ask for help (5 min).

3. Panel: Growing a technology team from 1 to 30+ with 4 of NY's leading CTOs and a CTO-turned-VC. (1hr)

4.  After-hours hanging out at a nearby bar / restaurant.

 

Full Description:

 

1. Joaquin Roca talk on Team Dynamics (1hr)

Joaquin will talk about growing human systems from the perspective of latest psychology and team dynamics research. http://joaquinroca.com/

Here is a preview of his organizational scaling model.

http://goo.gl/zlubY

Joaquin Roca help NY startups gracefully scale their human systems.

Joaquin guide these ventures as their co-founders work through difficult conversations and build relationships; while their teams discover how to work productively together; through the process of mindfully creating culture; and as they mature to help them remain nimble at scale. Over the past 13 years he's consulted for large-scale change initiatives, facilitated trainings, led strategic planning sessions and retreats, coached executives, and conducted applied research projects. As a consultant Joaquin worked with lots of great organizations including Harvest, SumAll, Urtak, numerous agencies in the United Nations system, The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and Pfizer, to name a few.

 

 

 

2. Open forum to ask for help (5 min). This is a chance for people to ask questions from others, whether about some technology you are evaluating or some management issue you are struggling with.

 

3. Panel: Growing a technology team from 1 to 30+

If you are one day faced with the issue of scaling your infrastructure, chances are you will be simultaneously working on scaling your technology team. Our panelists will discuss some of the things that changed as they grew teams over their careers e.g., the types of people they hired; processes that scaled and processes that didn't; how they adapted their org structures etc.

Moderator: Liz Crawford, CTO @ Birchbox

Panelists:

  • Andrey Akselrod, CTO @ Smartling
  • Gil Beyda, Founder and Managing Partner @ Genacast Ventures
  • Tom Janofsky, VPE @ Monetate
  • Cailin Nelson, VPE @ Turntable
  • Ian White, CTO @ Sailthru

Bios of Panelists:

Tom Janofsky is a software engineer with 15 years of experience in successfully building software and teams. Prior to joining Monetate, he started and ran a software development consulting firm, where he designed and developed software as well as led teams that built large-scale, web-facing transactional software for clients that included EMC, FEMA, JBoss, and Pearson. Tom regularly presents at users’ groups and conferences.

Gil Beyda is the Founder & Managing Partner of Genacast Ventures, a seed fund formed in partnership with Comcast Ventures to invest in technology-centric, Internet start-ups. Gil has invested in Invite Media (acquired by Google), Demdex (acquired by Adobe), DoubleVerify, Packlate, Enterproid, Mortar Data, LeadiD and YieldMo.
Gil is a seasoned entrepreneur turned venture capitalist. Gil launched his first company Mind Games in 1982 to develop games for the original Apple II. Gil then started a software consulting firm with Fortune 100 clients in the U.S., Asia and Europe.
In 1995, Gil helped pioneer Internet advertising by founding Real Media, the first online ad network and ad server company. After Real Media was acquired in 2001, Gil pioneered the next wave of online advertising as CTO of TACODA, the first behavioral targeting, ad network. Following AOL’s acquisition of TACODA in 2007, Gil founded Genacast Ventures.

Andrey Akselrod, Founder and CTO, Smartling Inc. Andrey is responsible for Smartling technology development and infrastructure. He has built Translation Management System and Global Delivery Network from the ground up. The software facilitates millions of translations, delivers more than a billion page views a month, works across multiple datacenters with hundreds of servers under management delivering 99.99% uptime. It allows customers to get up and running in multiple languages in a very short period of time.

Prior to Smartling Andrey served as VP, Technology at SpaFinder where he developed and maintained company’s eCommerce platform and web site delivering gift cards and web-based gift certificates across the globe and supporting a worldwide network of 10,000 spas. Previously, he held executive positions at RunTime Technologies working on data asset management and content management systems for various large scale projects.

Liz Crawford is the CTO at Birchbox (http://www.birchbox.com). Birchbox is the leading global discovery commerce platform for both men and women. Birchbox redefines the retail process by offering consumers a personalized way to discover, learn about and purchase the best beauty, grooming and lifestyle products.  Liz has published papers on topics ranging from Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to Intelligent Tutoring Systems and Robotics. She has a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon and is a co-organizer of CTO School.

4.  After-hours hanging out at a nearby bar / restaurant.   We'll walk over after the meetup.   We usually have about 20-30 people coming, come out with us!

 

Join or login to comment.

  • John Peter Sabini
    John Peter Sabini

    Really good discussion. Something I had to do for two companies was to grow the tech support team from 4 to a global org of 50. Wish I knew then what I know now.

    December 13

  • Raphael Antonmattei
    Raphael Antonmattei

    I attended the first talk only and I thought it was disappointing. A lot of talking but very few practical insights. I was actually hoping to learn how to scale a team and how to deal with this moment when a start up is transitioning from a "boutique shop" to a more organized business.
    The venue is great as usual ;-)

    December 11

    • View all 3 replies
    • Vietnhi Phuvan
      Vietnhi Phuvan

      I like the balanced format: presentation, panel, audience participation. Even though we started on time at 7 PM - hey, no fair :) - I don't think that in this instance - and I repeat, in this instance, that we had enough time for the panel and especially the audience participation part. The whole point of this exercise is to pool experiences and perspectives for everyone's benefit, including the presenter and the members of the panel :) I recommend the breakup into groups, which maximizes audience participation, with a report given by a member of the group :) Frankly, I think we might have been better off with just the panel and the audience participation given the time available - the presenter, of course, would be welcome to lead the panel :)

      December 11

    • Josh
      Josh

      Thanks Jean, there were some good bits in the first presentation, but there wasn't enough meat to be super informative. The panel was insightful.

      December 11

  • Luis Sanz
    Luis Sanz

    One of the best panels ever. (And oddly, the first talk was quite weak, took time from the "main event")

    December 11

  • Paul Schreiber
    Paul Schreiber

    Content was good, but could have been condensed into about 1/2 the time.

    December 11

  • Vietnhi Phuvan
    Vietnhi Phuvan

    Peter principle: everybody gets promoted to his level of incompetence :)

    Murphy's law: anything that can go wrong will go wrong :)

    December 10

  • Vietnhi Phuvan
    Vietnhi Phuvan

    Back at the first engineering firm I worked at full time (it went from a four-person startup to the most successful environmental planning firm in the New York Metro area), we hired on potential and promoted on the basis of demonstrated ability AND potential :)

    December 10

  • Glenn
    Glenn

    Consistently one of the best meetups I have been to. Tonight was no exception. Thanks to the great panelists/presenter.

    December 10

  • Glenn
    Glenn

    Consistently one of the best meetups I have been to. Tonight was no exception. Thanks to the great panelists/presenter.

    December 10

  • Glenn
    Glenn

    Consistently one of the best meetups I have been to. Tonight was no exception. Thanks to the great panelists/presenter.

    December 10

  • Vietnhi Phuvan
    Vietnhi Phuvan

    Clausewitz wrote that no plan survives contact with the enemy. I'd say that it's a pretty rare plan that survives in its original form contact with reality - the best laid plans of mice and men go gang aft aglee :)

    Can't remember the last time everything I planned went without a hitch :)

    December 10

  • Vietnhi Phuvan
    Vietnhi Phuvan

    For a manager (technical lead, technical product management or project management), setting priorities is only the beginning of the tale.

    A manager must continually balance and rebalance priorities as deadlines are being expected to be met and others expected to be missed. These priorities must be broken down into must-have-features or must-have-issues resolved by the next release cycle. If these core priiorties are not being met, then something must give: the release deadline, the postponement of the fix to take place after the release date, throwing in your best guy or gal at the problem, resolving the problem by the release date at the cost of sacrificing specific non-critical issues work, etc.

    As for the far less critical issues, the manager must constantly decide which mix of issues will be done by the release date.

    December 10

  • Philip Lui
    Philip Lui

    some interesting insight from a variety of experiences

    December 10

  • Dan Marques
    Dan Marques

    Great and very informative!

    December 10

140 attended

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