February 2017 Meetup

Join us for the monthly meeting of CTO School in Boston.

6:30-7:00 - mingling with other members, dinner
7:00-8:00 - Presentations and discussion
8:00-8:30ish - more mingling

Please share with other engineering leaders who would enjoy learning from and connecting with peers.

Speakers

David Sturman - High-growth hiring to build a high-functioning team

Hiring is often the hardest and most important thing a technology manager has to do. It isn't something you ever learn in school, and everyone does it differently. This talk will be an interactive session about your best and worst hiring practices, what you've seen, what I've seen, and what are some good ways to ensure that you hire efficiently and effectively for high-growth, high-functioning tech teams.

David Sturman has over 35 years of experience in development and management of software technology in both startups and large enterprises. He spent much of his early career as a software developer at the leading edge of computer graphics and animation, working at Bell Labs, the NYIT Computer Graphics Lab, and Medialab Paris. For the past 18 years, he's been the CTO or VP of Engineering for start-ups in New York and Boston and has held Software Director-level positions at Microsoft and Audible (a division of Amazon). Over the years, this has involved a lot of hiring, building some teams from scratch. Most recently, Dr. Sturman has been a consultant to Boston-based start-ups providing strategic and technological support through challenging periods of growth as well as serving as an Executive Partner in the Strategy Consulting Practice of Bulger Partners in Boston. He is a founding member of the Boston CTO Club and the New York CTO Club.

Alan Greenblatt - Not For the Faint of Heart

If you have the stomach for it, being a CTO is great. You have a lot of responsibility and a never ending supply of great business and technical challenges to solve. You are absolutely never bored. As your company grows and evolves though, the nature of what you do, how you contribute, the decisions you make, the levels of stress and the types of problems you solve changes as well. In this talk we’ll be discussing what is involved in bringing a fledgling idea to a fully funded successful startup, and hopefully being a valuable CTO in the process.

Alan Greenblatt is the CTO and co-founder of Waltham-based PaymentWorks. He has started and sold several software companies, and has led product development teams at companies such as Microsoft, Metatomix and Adobe. 5 years ago, while working at Adobe, a friend approached him with what they both thought was a great idea. They have now raised over $7M in private financing, there are thousands of companies using the system and the future looks very bright, but it hasn’t always been easy.