Tech Leadership from 0 to Scale

In this talk, Ian and Darren will illustrate how the role of a technical leader evolves throughout the early and formative stages of company growth. They'll highlight key learnings identified as the Drop Engineering team has rapidly grown from 2 members to over 20 in just 2 years. Shipping with just enough process is one among other principles of how they successfully go from 0 to scale. Different aspects of technical leadership in a fast paced environment will be covered across systems, strategy, people, and process. They'll compare it to their past experiences being technical leaders in Silicon Valley-based tech companies, such as Airbnb and Eventbrite, unpacking philosophies and traits of impactful leadership for companies scaling.

About this speaker

Darren Fung is the co-founder and CTO of Drop, an intelligent mobile rewards platform that curates personalized rewards and offers for everyday spending. Drop aims to modernize the loyalty space, removing the need for physical cards and creating a product that works seamlessly in the background as you spend. Launched in late 2016, Drop has since raised over $28 million in venture funding and has over 2 million members. In 2013, Darren led the engineering team at Tunezy, a platform for online musicians. Darren was instrumental to Tunezy's success winning the Innovator's Showcase Award by Billboard and National Business and Technology Conference Entrepreneurship. After Tunezy sold to SFX Entertainment (NASDAQ: SFXE), Darren subsequently joined Eventbrite as a software engineer, where he was key to the release of its pick-a-seat and reserved seating features. In 2019, Darren was named to the Forbes Top 30 under 30 list under the consumer technology category.

Ian Logan is the VP Engineering of Drop, a consumer fintech building the first intelligent rewards program that surfaces personalized offers based on the way you spend. Prior to Drop, Ian was Director of Engineering at Airbnb for 6 years leading an organization of over 100 engineers across Payments and Business Travel. As an early engineer at Airbnb, he built some of the underlying infrastructure and financial systems that now have a 50+ billion dollar global footprint. At Airbnb, Ian was a founding member of the Engineering leadership team having a defining role in its values and culture for innovation. Prior to Airbnb, Ian built core trading algorithms and securities lending applications for world-class investment banks, such as BlackRock and Barclays Global Investors, with trillions in assets under management. Ian also serves as an adviser to early-stage startups in technology.

About this meetup

Leading & managing teams of software engineers can be challenging. This meetup is for technical leaders of all experience levels to connect, share stories and learn from each other. Topics include all of the typical Team Lead duties such as recruiting talent, team building, coaching, delegating, scaling technical groups, managing projects, etc.

Meetups are catered, start with a presentation from a domain expert and continue with lots of interesting conversations with your peers.