CTO Wisdom with Asanka Jayasuriya | Beyond the Program

Welcome to CTO Wisdom. In this series, we interview technical leaders who have stepped into executive positions.

Today’s guest host, Eric Brooke, speaks with Asanka Jayasuriya, CTO at 8VC, where he works on their Build program, which incubates several new companies a year. In today’s episode, they discuss:

• Asanka’s career journey through big and medium tech
• Setting others up for success
• The importance of Developing Leaders and ideas (and how to do this!)
• The transition when your peers become stakeholders at the Executive level (and how to manage through the transition)
• The difference of a Private vs. Public board and its impact on technology
• What it’s like to be a portfolio CTO role

About today’s guest: As CTO at 8VC, Asanka Jayasuriya helps startups with product and engineering strategy, particularly as they scale. He also works extensively on 8VCs Build program that incubates several new companies a year. A software engineer by training, Asanka has nearly 25 years of experience building products across enterprise saas, e-commerce, collaboration software, and security products. He's worked for industry leading companies like Oracle, Amazon, Atlassian and SailPoint.

About today’s host: Eric Brooke has a rich and varied leadership career - leading up to 21,000 people and Billions in revenue, throughout 14 countries. In their career, they have been an Executive six times (e.g. President, CEO, CMO, and CTO) and a Board member of multiple organisations. Eric has been a CTO of scaling startups from 0 to 120 engineers. As an adviser and mentor, they have helped multiple other startups scale both in Canada and the US. As well as supporting multiple startup incubators such as 1871 in Chicago and TechStars.

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