CTOs & Founders - Scaling & Politics

Tuesday 20th November 2018 | CTOs & Founders – Scaling & Politics**

We are very pleased to announce that the first in the series of CTOs & Founders meetup groups will be held on Tuesday 20th November 2018 with long-terms partners of La Fosse Associates, Octopus Labs.

This event will be held at 33 Holborn, London, EC2N 1HT and is titled ' Scaling & Politics' – with special guest speakers including Sam Handfield-Jones – Chief Product Officer, Octopus Labs, Tony Hollyhurst – VP Engineering at American Express, and David Townsend – CTO at FreeUp.io.

Some information on our hosts…

Octopus Labs is the innovation and product development arm of Octopus Investments – the award-winning investment company managing over £8 billion of assets. They combine established financial services expertise with cutting edge technology to create disruptive fintech products.

Since launch, Labs products have had £350m invested through them and they have grown by 200% a year. These include Octopus Choice – a P2P platform investing, with Octopus, in carefully selected loans backed by bricks and mortar and Octopus Cash, a marketplace for challenger banks and savers aimed at making saving simple.

Octopus also run an innovative Academy programme as well as highly successful FinTech Accelerator programmes.

Our format for the evening…

18:00-18:30
Arrival, welcome drinks...

18:45-18:55
Sam Handfield-Jones, Chief Product Officer, Octopus Labs

An introduction to Octopus Labs by their Chief Product Officer, Sam Handfield-Jones, who is responsible for the analysis and structuring of new ideas and products, early stage business and propositions, product development, developing product and market fit as well as managing the profitability, product and commercial development of these businesses on an ongoing basis.

19:00-19:20
David Townsend, CTO & Co-Founder, FreeUp.io

David is the CTO and Co-Founder of new FinTech company, FreeUp.io. Previously, he was VP Engineering at Funding Circle through a huge growth period for the company and has held multiple Director positions and at leading online technology businesses throughout his career.

'Too Many Politics'
How complex human interactions can be too easily dismissed as politics as a team scale. Understanding the increasing complexity of your organisation is not only essential for scaling but becomes increasingly your main role. David Townsend reflects on his time scaling the team at Funding Circle.

19:20-19:40
Tony Hollyhurst, VP Engineering, American Express

Tony is VP Engineering at American Express, the global financial services company with headquarters in the US and a very large presence in London and the South Coast.

Tony is a highly experienced VP / Director of Engineering with a wealth of knowledge in the financial services and cloud distribution industry. He was previously Director of Engineering at Anaplan's London office, where he built the London team from scratch and is now helping AMEX innovative the way they build financial products for the UK market.

Tony will be giving us some insight into the lessons he has learned during his career in technical leadership, as well as some of the methods he used to help scale talented engineering teams for some of the world's biggest organisations.

19:45 onwards | Q&A and Networking

As always, our hosts for the evening will be providing free food, alcohol and soft drinks as well as exclusive use of their facilities for the attendees on the evening.

Be sure to book your seat for this event ASAP as numbers are limited on the night.

We look forward to welcoming you to the first of many CTOs & Founders; please reach out to us directly with any questions at all.

All the best,

Adam Kinder
CTOs & Founders