Engineering Founders

Lee Edwards, General Partner @ Root Ventures, shares insights on identifying your competitive edge, recommendations for differentiation, and how to make sure your business is venture-aligned. He discusses his transition from eng leadership into the venture capital world, sharing advice on ideation for early-stage founders who are still developing their product & deciding which version of an idea to pursue. Lee also shares how to navigate risks as a founder, tips for expanding your product’s niches, how generative AI growth will impact DevTool development, and how to maintain conviction when faced with discouragement head on.

Lee Edwards (@terronk) is an Olin College alum from the Class of '07 majoring in Engineering with a focus in Systems Design. After a brief role as a mechanical engineer at iRobot in Bedford, MA, Lee's career became focused on building software and team at startups - Pivotal, SideTour (which was acquired by Groupon), and Teespring. After a few years investing as part of Bloomberg Beta's Open Angels program, he joined Root Ventures as a partner, investing venture capital in early stage deep technology startups. Lee also co-founded Parcel B, a loose organization of Olin alumni who invest in Olin entrepreneurs and run programs for Olin students interested in learning more about the startup ecosystem.

"If you can create something with enough value where people are gonna start paying for it, that can de-risk in your mind like, 'Okay, I might be onto something…' but it doesn't always have to be revenue. It's not, 'Is someone willing to pay X dollars a month?' It's actually a higher bar than that. It's like, 'Is someone gonna switch from VS Code or Vim or Emacs or TextMate and use your editor a few hours a day?' That's a really high bar. You have to really love the product and watching that number go up. It's a really good indicator that what is being built is the right thing.”

- Lee Edwards   

• What inspired Lee to transition from eng leadership to the world of venture (2:06)
• Factors that led to a successful transition from side project to full-time work (4:11)
• Recommendations for gaining conviction when facing discouragement (6:04)
• Considerations during pre-product phase conversations with founders (8:52)
• Questions to help founders begin testing which ideas are worth pursuing (12:46)
• Navigating risks as a founder & what qualities VCs are looking for (15:34)
• Insights for founders having to expand their niches right away (17:19)
• Questions to ask to define the context & identify GTM strategy (24:05)
• Business models that are inherently misaligned with venture (26:30)
• Identifying differentiation in the era of generative AI (29:14)
• How the DevTool landscape will evolve with the rise of AI (34:08)
• Lee’s perspective on how AI will impact programming & coding (35:50)
• Rapid fire questions (37:53)

• [Most Startups Should be Deer Hunters by Mark Suster](https://bothsidesofthetable.com/most-startups-should-be-deer-hunters-7fdecf58f4f6#:~:text=Deer are right-sized for,to your standard terms %26 conditions.))
• 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy - Drawing on his decades of experience as a business strategy advisor, active equity investor and Stanford University teacher, Hamilton Helmer develops from first principles a practical theory of Strategy rooted in the notion of Power, those conditions which create the potential for persistent differential returns. Using rich real-world examples, Helmer rigorously characterizes exactly what your business must achieve to create Power. And create Power it must, for without it your business is at risk.

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

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Vidya Raman, Partner @ Sorensen Ventures, shares her best practices for developing a strong enterprise GTM strategy & why this is such a challenging thing to do as a new founder. We also dive into blindspots that highly technical founders may possess, balancing the technical aspects of founding with the anthropological side, product considerations when building for enterprise, timing new product releases, developing & articulating your product roadmap. Plus how to identify and build your “wedge,” & avoid becoming simply a point solution. We also cover how to tackle a common founder concern – honing your sales skills – and when to know it’s time to bring in a non-technical co-founder.

Vidya Raman joined Sorenson Ventures in 2019 from Cloudera, where she led the ML platform, the fastest-growing product line in the company’s history at the time. There, she was responsible for making ML at scale a reality for customers spanning industries such as autonomous driving, biotech, banking, and government. Before that, she led engineering and product teams at venture-backed enterprise startups, including eMeter (Sequoia-funded, acquired by Siemens) and Silver Spring Networks (Kleiner funded, IPO exit).

Throughout her career, Vidya has worked with teams that have taken more than a dozen products from mere ideas to many millions in revenue and eventually to product-market fit. She draws on her rich set of successes and failures, helping founders navigate the journey to product-market fit while at the same time being an eternal student in the constantly evolving world of go-to-market techniques.

Vidya is passionate about partnering with technical founders who think in first principles, dream big, and are keen to build businesses that stand the test of time. Vidya’s primary focus is on startups that build for the builders, i.e., tools used by engineers.

Working with companies in their earliest stages is her passion. She believes that the opportunity to have the most meaningful and direct impact is at that stage.

Outside of work, she loves spending time in nature and reading. Her favorite genre includes biographies (all-time favorite: Nelson Mandela), behavioral economics, and psychology (favorite: Thinking fast, slow). She is a die-hard Harry Potter fan, and her favorite spell is Wingardium Leviosa.

"There is something about selling to enterprises that goes beyond what's on the surface of what you offer as a product. To me, that became about how do you enable the people first and foremost and then the business. It's not actually the other way around. Oftentimes, I've seen that products which get embraced within enterprises have enabled someone to become a hero, oftentimes a superhero. That is how human doing business is actually. Even for very, very technical enterprise products.”

- Vidya Raman   

• Vidya’s background & passion for the enterprise GTM world (2:54)
• Strategies for enabling people first, then the business (7:29)
• Vidya’s perspective on why GTM is challenging for first-time technical founders (10:06)
• Vital considerations for founders when building a product for enterprise (14:53)
• What to do (& not to do) when discussing your product roadmap to sell (18:23)
• What’s the wedge? Product / Platform / Timing considerations to get you in the door of enterprise companies (22:05)
• Optimizing locally vs. globally (23:42)
• Signs that indicate that the timing is right for expansion (25:27)
• Recommendations for founders to hone selling skills (27:33)
• Why good sellers have more than just an extroverted personality (29:33)
• Train your social & emotional antenna (30:53)
• Considerations for having a non-technical co-founder (32:37)
• Rapid fire questions (34:57)

• Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler's Defeat - A gripping and vivid narrative of adventure and derring-do that is also, perhaps, the last great untold story of the Second World War.

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

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James Everingham, co-founder and former VP of Engineering @ Lightspark, joins our podcast to share his best tools for scaling yourself down – not up – as an engineering leader. He discusses his latest career move shifting down in scale and how that impacts your risk tolerance as a leader. We also cover some of James’ favorite leadership methods, including the Socratic method, principle-based decision-making, and creating narratives as a product / eng org goal-setting tool, plus how he’s employed those tools effectively throughout his career. We also address navigating the balance between process & anti-process, approaches to product planning & finding PMF, and adapting your communication style to work within a smaller vs. large org.

James Everingham (@jevering) is co-founder and former VP of Engineering at Lightspark. Lightspark is building core infrastructure on the Lightning Network. Most recently he was Vice President of Engineering for Novi (Meta) and co-creator of Diem. Previously, James was the Head of Engineering at Instagram. James has led many world-class engineering teams throughout his 35-year career as a manager, entrepreneur, and technology developer. At Yahoo, he was Vice President of Engineering for Yahoo media properties after acquiring Luminate, an interactive image technology company he founded. Other previous roles include CTO and founding team member of LiveOps, Senior Director of Engineering at Tellme (acquired by Microsoft), and Senior Director of Engineering at Netscape Communications, where he was responsible for the flagship Netscape browser. Before joining Netscape, James held engineering and management positions at Oracle and Borland International.

"We had a great story in our head of like if we can simply make money flow or value flow fast and free frictionlessly around the world like a lot of good is going to happen but then that's the ending. That's the happy ending. Like, what are the chapters that we're going to write in between to get there? The first one was, 'Well, we're going to build this new infrastructure. Let's start getting it out there and getting it quickened in an area where it's already accepted.' And that's what we did. You know, that was the first one and we worked backwards from that. They're trying to make the story happen. They're not trying to make a list of tasks happen and I think that's a really important distinction.”

- James Everingham   

• James’ latest experience scaling down in his career (2:45)
• Increasing your risk tolerance as an eng leader (5:20)
• Surprising ways eng leaders operate in a smaller org vs. a larger org (7:21)
• Optimizing communicating patterns when scaling down as a leader (10:28)
• Strategies for creating high-impact conversations within teams at a small org (12:17)
• How to use the Socratic method effectively as an eng leader (14:09)
• James’ framework for anchoring decision-making principles (17:10)
• Why focusing on customer problems before business problems is a key principle (19:35)
• Layering the Socratic method approach & principle-based decision making (21:48)
• Tips for implementing these approaches early on & scaling them up (24:36)
• The trap of “process” & knowing when / where to introduce processes (25:46)
• Navigating the balance between complete process & anti-process (28:04)
• Deconstructing James’ approach to product planning & goal setting (29:55)
• How James introduced the product planning narrative @ Lightspark (34:19)
• Advice for newcomers looking to identify & share a product narrative (36:42)
• Rapid fire questions (38:35)

• How to Scale Yourself Down — Not Up — as a Leader - An article outlining the narrative goal setting framework that James discusses in the episode.
• Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know - Adam Grant’s book about the benefit of doubt and how we can get better at embracing the unknown and the joy of being wrong.

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

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Scott Woody, co-founder and CTO @ Metronome, shares the story of how Metronome, a small startup, made the transition to quickly operate at a global scale while working with complex, public companies. He shares the origin story of Metronome and the roadmap of how they went from early-stage engineering to creating highly specialized teams & in-house experts. Additionally, we cover how to navigate the tension between infrastructure & product eng teams, creating a healthy relationship between finance & eng orgs, and recommendations for strategically considering pivoting business models.

Scott (@l3amm) is currently co-founder and CTO of Metronome, the usage-based billing platform built to help software companies accelerate their revenue. Prior to Metronome, Scott was a Director of Engineering at Dropbox where he led the growth and monetization team. He previously co-founded Foundry Hiring, an ATS system, that was later acquired by Dropbox.

"When we were smaller, we had one giant engineering team. What we realized about nine months ago, especially as we started working with these more public companies, was that the needs of the specific personas were so specific that this concept of engineers being able to fit the entire product and need space in their head was impossible. We had to create those experts and decided to have PMs specialize and embed with these teams to become experts on the workflows.”

- Scott Woody   

• The origin story of Metronome & Scott’s transition from Dropbox (3:00)
• How Metronome gained & maintained its first customers (5:22)
• Metronome’s two products / distinct user personas (7:44)
• Challenges from multiple complex stakeholders and users (10:03)
• The difficulty in solving & prioritizing user problems (12:10)
• Navigating the tension between product eng & infrastructure sides (15:26)
• How Metronome created experts in house & built a retainer of consultants (19:15)
• Roadmap for going from early-stage engineering to specialized teams (20:56)
• Processes for standardizing the knowledge base & communicating the info (23:02)
• Using brown bag talks to onboard new hires (26:02)
• Implications of a usage-based business model for eng leaders (28:12)
• Lessons learned when changing your business model (30:08)
• Making the shift to a consumption-based model (32:30)
• Strategies for rationalizing which pricing model to follow & knowing when to pivot (36:08)
• Developing & testing a value hypothesis (38:05)
• Lead with customer value in mind & communicate that value factor (40:44)
• Rapid fire questions (42:07)

• Elon Musk - From Walter Isaacson, this is the astonishingly intimate story of the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era—a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence. Oh, and took over Twitter.
• Foundation - The first novel in Isaac Asimov's classic science-fiction masterpiece, the Foundation series.

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Quinn Jacobson, Director of the Technical Entrepreneur Coaching Hub (TECH) @ Carnegie Mellon University, joins us to share best practices for implementing a successful execution strategy at deep tech startups. He draws from his own experience as a serial founder & former VPE, sharing strategies for building on technical expertise; driving product evolution from early concept results; finding your “ledge” & thinking of value creation in smaller, incremental steps. Plus we talk about the pitfalls new founders should avoid and the importance of listening! Quinn also shares how & why he transitioned into academia & why these recommendations will help new founders create disruptive, exciting products.

Quinn Jacobson is a Professor of the Practice at the Information Networking Institute (INI) in Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering. He is based in CMU’s Silicon Valley campus and the Director for the new Technical Entrepreneur Coaching Hub (TECH) initiative. TECH is focused on preparing the next generation of technical founders and strengthening CMU’s engagement with the startup community. Quinn is also part of CMU’s Neuromorphic Computer Architecture Lab.

Prior to joining Carnegie Mellon University, Quinn led engineering efforts at several innovative startups, in high-performance distributed software systems and domain-specific hardware accelerators. Quinn cofounded Vibrado Technologies, a venture-backed CMU spinout that created the first truly smart apparel. Before discovering his passion for startups, Quinn worked on advanced technology development. He developed the world’s first commercially released soft core for FPGAs at Altera, architected the world’s first multi-core SPARC microprocessors at Sun Microsystems, and led the development of one of the first crowdsourced smartphone services at Nokia. Quinn received his PhD in ECE from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and holds over 70 granted U.S. patents. His work has been presented in many diverse forums, from GEOINT to Hot Chips to the NABC Convention at the NCAA Final Four.

"What will make you successful is if you can actually execute and deliver your technology from a concept to a product. If you're armed with a plan on how to do the execution, it's gonna be much easier to then go raise money. What we see is that there are a lot of great thoughts out there that people don't know how to turn that into a successful execution plan that they can realistically deliver on.”

- Quinn Jacobson   

Technical Entrepreneur Coaching Hub (TECH) is a program for mid-career engineers transitioning to a technical founder role. TECH’s curriculum prepares technical experts to launch and run an entrepreneurial (or intrapreneurial) endeavor around a technically innovative idea.

TECH is an entrepreneurship program designed for engineers, by engineers who have launched, led, and advised startups. The program focuses on how to successfully execute the development of a product in a startup environment.

Learn more here: https://www.cmu.edu/ini/tech/index.html

Being an ELC member is FREE and is the best way to stay updated on everything that’s going on!

• Quinn’s transition into academia & his passion for entrepreneurship (3:14)
• Focusing on technical expertise & execution strategy (6:35)
• Frameworks for building an execution strategy & initial proof of concept (9:18)
• An example of using early concept results to drive product evolution (11:32)
• Incremental value creation for technically differentiated startups (15:55)
• Strategies for building a roadmap & demonstrating concrete value in early stages (18:59)
• Traps new founders / technical leaders should avoid (20:27)
• How listening can provide opportunities for discovery of the path forward (23:30)
• CMU’s TECH experience & how it supports early-stage deep tech founders (26:27)
• One of Quinn’s most memorable / favorite case studies (27:54)
• Rapid fire questions (30:00)

• *System Collapse* by Martha Wells - Following the events in Network Effect, the Barish-Estranza corporation has sent rescue ships to a newly-colonized planet in peril, as well as additional SecUnits. But if there’s an ethical corporation out there, Murderbot has yet to find it, and if Barish-Estranza can’t have the planet, they’re sure as hell not leaving without something. If that something just happens to be an entire colony of humans, well, a free workforce is a decent runner-up prize, but there’s something wrong with Murderbot; it isn’t running within normal operational parameters. ART’s crew and the humans from Preservation are doing everything they can to protect the colonists, but with Barish-Estranza’s SecUnit-heavy persuasion teams, they’re going to have to hope Murderbot figures out what’s wrong with itself, and fast.

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

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Jon Perl & Scott Wilson share the origin story of QA Wolf & deconstruct their best practices (and what to avoid) for early-stage cold outreach, how to add value to your cold email communications, and why experimenting with your cold outreach is important to early sales! We also dive into the story behind QA Wolf’s strategic move to incorporate services into their business strategy & tangible ways to add accountability measures that will help drive growth in the early days of your company.

Jon Perl is the co-founder and CEO of QA Wolf, a startup building the QA solution every engineering leader wishes for. Prior to QA Wolf, Perl led engineering teams in the healthcare and home services space, where he learned firsthand how difficult automated regression testing can be — and how critical it is for teams to have. His interest in software engineering comes from an overarching desire to eliminate boring, repetitive tasks and give people their time back. He has a dog named Finn and enjoys hiking.

"Your goal is simply to book a meeting. You're not trying to close a deal through one email. It's like, 'How can I just get on the phone with somebody?' That's the goal.”

- Jon Perl   

As co-founder and head of growth at QA Wolf, Scott Wilson is trying to upend 20+ years of stagnation in the QA industry. Before this he launched the marketing efforts at Wyze and helped acquire 6 million paying customers. If he’s not working, you might find him backpacking with Frank the dog, or learning a new illusion.

"It's not referencing the weather in Seattle or that you got promoted. Personalization is being contextually relevant to the person. This is how your mind should be thinking. It's like, 'I saw you're a hundred person company with nine engineers on your team and no QA engineers. You're probably going through this and here's a solution for it.'”

- Scott Wilson   

QA Wolf is a hybrid platform & service that helps software teams ship better software faster by taking QA completely off their plate.

ELCs Peer Groups provide a virtual, curated, and ongoing peer learning opportunity to help you navigate the unknown, uncover solutions, and accelerate your learning with a small group of trusted peers.

Apply to join a peer group HERE: sfelc.com/peerGroups

• The origin story of QA Wolf & the desire to build an automated QA system (2:54)
• What got Scott excited about joining the QA Wolf founding team (8:01)
• Scott’s experience as the non-technical cofounder on the team (9:59)
• Learn enough to be dangerous & be willing to persist as a founder (11:35)
• The approach of paying people you can learn from & its impact on QA Wolf (14:58)
• Lessons learned about cold emailing & effective strategies to implement (17:59)
• Cold emailing strategies that don’t work (21:47)
• How to add value to email communication & incorporate experimentation (23:10)
• Why they shifted the focus from coding to sales / outreach / identifying solutions (27:09)
• Make accountability mechanisms a key component of early-stage teams (29:55)
• The false signal of free users & expanding product into services (31:31)
• Identifying a gap in the business & being open-minded to new ideas (34:07)
• What the initial testing for QA Wolf’s services approach looked like (36:09)
• Jon & Scott’s perspective on dealing w/ investors in the automated services space (39:17)
• Rapid fire questions (44:46)

• $100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No
• How to Hire a Product-Led Sales Leader – at Every Stage

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

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Jorge Torres, CEO & Co-founder @ MindsDB, shares how his lifelong entrepreneurial spirit helped encourage him to pursue engineering & why an engineering background is an amazing asset for founders. He also shares valuable insights he has learned along the way, including why it’s important for founders to make plans in order to execute well, tips for creating alignment within your org, and strategically building a community approach within your product strategy.

Jorge Torres is CEO & Co-founder @ MindsDB. Jorge is a visiting scholar at the University of California Berkeley researching machine learning automation and explainability, an advocate for the open source community, and prior to MindsDB he worked with Aneesh Chopra (the first CTO in the US government) building data systems that analyze billions of patient’s records that led to savings for millions of patients.

"Truly there's a lot of things that you don't know when you're starting a company, maybe even things that you don't even know that you don't know, but at least the first steps of risk, which is, 'Can I get something off the ground by myself if I have to?' And that's a very, very, very attractive angle of being an engineer and you learn some skills and then the training of an engineer is how do you take tools are out there and build something?”

- Jorge Torres   

MindsDB is end-to-end AI platform for developers. It connects real-time data and AI/ML models, providing tools and automation that enable developers to build, launch, and maintain AI-powered applications efficiently. The company was founded in 2017 by Jorge Torres and Adam Carrigan and has raised more than $50M in funding from Mayfield, Nvidia's NVentures, Benchmark, YCombinator, and others.

ELCs Peer Groups provide a virtual, curated, and ongoing peer learning opportunity to help you navigate the unknown, uncover solutions and accelerate your learning with a small group of trusted peers.

Apply to join a peer group HERE: sfelc.com/peerGroups

• Why Monday is Jorge’s favorite day of the week (1:55)
• Jorge’s approach to becoming a founder & starting MindsDB (2:32)
• Skills engineers can develop to prepare for being a founder (4:26)
• Benefits of having engineering skills & background as a founder/CEO (6:42)
• The story behind Jorge’s risk assessment strategy & deciding to found MindsDB (8:02)
• Questions to ask to help founders narrow their focus (10:15)
• Why everything founders try that isn’t well planned doesn’t work well (12:08)
• How this insight is leveraged within MindsDB’s open-source community (14:55)
• Building alignment as the team grows (18:08)
• The importance of letting go of things as you build your business (20:15)
• Using intuition in the early days of MindsDB’s product / business approach (23:08)
• The relationship between community & business (24:51)
• Inside Jorge’s approach to modular pieces that drive growth (27:56)
• What the next iteration looks like for the SF AI Collective community (29:45)
• Rapid fire questions (32:13)

• The Broken Earth Trilogy - N. K. Jemisin’s captivating science fiction/fantasy series that follows the journey of a woman with the power to control earthquakes as she navigates a world on the brink of destruction.

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Gaurav Oberoi, CEO & Co-founder @ Lexion shares about the research / EIR path from the Allen Institute for AI to founding Lexion. We talk about finding ideas in areas with poor implementation, how to actually shape “cool tech” into products, and tactical actions you can use to measure progress. Plus how to go from idea to action & optimize for fast time to value. Gaurav also shares how he defines “done” for products, creating a culture of velocity and strategic thinking & why happy customers are engaged customers.

Gaurav Oberoi is the CEO and co-founder of Lexion. He started his career as an engineer at Amazon, before moving on to found and sell two startups (BillMonk, and Precision Polling), and build a $20M+ ARR business from $0 as a VP of Product at SurveyMonkey. Gaurav co-founded Lexion as the first EIR at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He thrives on building products that customers love, with diverse teams that enjoy working together.

"We met with a team and when we asked them what intake forms they need, they had really long meetings and it slowed down the whole process and we're like, 'Gosh, we need to kill the intake form. You don't need an intake form.' Like, that shouldn't be a blocker to them getting value. That kind of narrow focus on "time to value needs to be really fast" is something that we've imbued across the whole company. So it's not just product and engineering, but it's also customer success. It's also sales. It's also our marketing materials right up front so that the value of the whole product ties in, all the way to pricing.”

- Gaurav Oberoi   

Lexion is a powerfully simple operations workflow and contracting platform that helps teams get deals done faster. Lexion streamlines and centralizes the end-to-end contract lifecycle with intuitive email-driven intake and workflows, simple no-code automation, best-in-class AI, and more. Lexion was one of the first AI companies to leverage LLMs in building production-quality applications. The company was founded in 2018 at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, is backed by an iconic Silicon Valley law firm, and recently raised a $20M Series B with support from top-tier VC firms. Learn more about the company at https://www.lexion.ai/

ELCs Peer Groups provide a virtual, curated, and ongoing peer learning opportunity to help you navigate the unknown, uncover solutions and accelerate your learning with a small group of trusted peers.

Apply to join a peer group HERE: sfelc.com/peerGroups

• Gaurav’s experience @ the Allen Institute for AI & how it kickstarted his founder journey w/ Lexion (2:06)
• Research process strategies that helps founders identify business insights (5:50)
• The iterations that led to Lexion’s current product offering (8:23)
• What gave Gaurav the insight to say “no” to ideas (10:39)
• Lessons learned that Gaurav infused into the strategy for developing Lexion (12:56)
• Small, tactical actions to help founders measure progress (15:55)
• Navigating the transition to actually building an idea & taking action (16:48)
• Understand the accolades your product can help customers receive (19:24)
• Designing your org to think strategically & drive insights like a founder (23:59)
• Determining which features to build first in order to achieve PMF (26:20)
• Strategies for identifying / confirming the next big feature opportunity (29:33)
• How to synthesize your learnings & research (32:19)
• Implementing metric tools to analyze insights / confirm hypotheses (34:37)
• What it means for a product or feature to be “done” (36:33)
• Why a happy customer equals an engaged customer (39:24)
• Creating a culture of velocity within elements of your organization (42:32)
• Encourage empathy for customers within your org to fuel velocity (46:43)
• Rapid fire questions (48:45)

• Organizing eng by strategic themes / complete units of value & consensus building to drive velocity w/ Emad Elwany #159 - Our episode with Gaurav’s co-founder Emad Elwany!
• goberoi.com - Gaurav Oberoi’s essays on technology and startups.
• The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress - Robert A. Heinlein’s tale of the rebellion of a former penal colony on the Moon against its masters on the Earth.

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

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How do you know if you’re actually solving a problem or building a product people actually want? Varun Mohan, CEO & Co-Founder @ Codeium, joins us to share the journey behind Codeium. We talk about determining the right problem / product to pursue. He shares his best frameworks for decision making, determining if it’s time to pivot, and ultimately testing your hypotheses. He also discusses the three main types of risks founders face & strategies to compete on “execution-risk.” Plus Varun shares tips for building your product with the future in mind, even if the technological capabilities aren’t there yet.

After graduating from MIT and working at companies like LinkedIn and Databricks, Varun became a Tech Lead Manager at Nuro leading AI Infrastructure before co-founding Exafunction to run large AI workloads. After hitting 7 figure ARR in the first year, Varun and team decided to drop everything and run their own AI platform with Codeium, first tackling the acceleration of Software Development.

"It's much better for us to invest in things that can give us compounding 10 percent wins. In other words, it gives us a win today, we work very hard and we work on things that can compound rather than them being one off features, we have like a good shot of doing something that that will succeed. We should be cognizant of where the technology is and only build things that build capabilities that we know will provide value today and if we continue doing that, we will be the fastest moving in the space.”

- Varun Mohan   

Codeium is the modern coding superpower, a code acceleration toolkit built on cutting edge AI technology. Get free forever access at codeium.com

• Varun’s leadership journey & founding Codeium (2:22)
• How to decide what to focus on next vs. moving forward with current focus (6:29)
• Determine what problem / product to pursue based on your team’s passions (8:39)
• Process for synthesizing insights to develop the rationale for moving forward (10:26)
• Varun’s assessment framework for making the decision to pivot (12:50)
• Traps to avoid when testing a hypothesis & addressing potential risks (14:10)
• How speed of execution sets a company up for success (17:35)
• Analyzing Varun’s differentiation moment & identifying next steps (21:16)
• Strategies for building / optimizing for an execution mode (25:28)
• Using data to capture user intent (27:42)
• Frameworks for identifying a product’s compounding elements (30:22)
• Determining what capabilities to invest in building early on (33:15)
• Building for future success when the technology isn’t there yet (35:19)
• Rapid fire questions (37:25)

• Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology - Chris Miller’s epic account of the decades-long battle to control what has emerged as the world's most critical resource—microchip technology—with the United States and China increasingly in conflict

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this Engineering Founders episode, we sit down with James Campbell, CTO & Co-Founder @ Great Expectations, to discuss his founding journey, considerations for starting open source, making community-driven decisions, and navigating the tension between your product vision & product roadmap. We also cover the phases that Great Expectations has cycled through, balancing the role of personal biases when making product / business decisions, how making an open-source product impacts marketing decisions, and James’ best recommendations for building out the product function as a product-involved founder.

James Campbell is the co-founder and CTO at Great Expectations, the leading open-source data quality product. Prior to his life at a startup, James spent nearly 15 years working across a variety of quantitative and qualitative analytic roles in the US intelligence community, ultimately serving as Chief Data Scientist at CIA. He studied Math and Philosophy at Yale, and international security at Georgetown. He is passionate about creating tools that help communicate uncertainty and build intuition about complex systems.

"We had different perspectives and then we found that there were, similarly for every three perspectives that the two of us had, there were three perspectives for every two other people in the community. The process becomes one of developing rigorous ways to capture and synthesize the insights that you're getting from yourself and the community. It means committing to capturing your own perspectives similarly to the way that you would capture those from your users, taking that time to do the analytic process of critically thinking through what that means is the right choice.”

- James Campbell   

We’re livestreaming the most popular sessions from the ELC Annual 2023 conference + hosting virtual roundtable discussions to connect you with eng leaders around the globe AND in your city.

Our first topic covers Generative AI & engineering leadership with Wade Chambers… no this isn’t about the tech - it’s about the leadership skills and competencies you need to evolve and adapt to lead in this next generation!

Europe

West Coast & MidWest

East Coast

• The origin story of Great Expectations & James’ founding journey (2:18)
• Pitching / validating your idea through community (5:14)
• Transitioning from federal government to co-founder of a company (8:11)
• Recommendations when considering the founder / collaboration path (10:20)
• James’ experience starting with open source & getting 10k stars on GitHub (12:05)
• Engaging with your audience to drive growth & share your product’s message (14:07)
• How open source impacts Great Expectations’ marketing / communication (15:49)
• Navigating the tension between product vision & product roadmap (18:11)
• Where that tension showed up in Great Expectations’ early days (21:01)
• Capturing & synthesizing insights from your users (22:44)
• Strategies for removing biases from product-related decisions (24:28)
• Finding the balance between your perspective & community insights (26:03)
• James’ perspective on different levels of product analysis (28:44)
• Lessons learned from Great Expectations’ phase changes (30:13)
• Takeaways from the org’s latest experience / transition (33:42)
• Defining the “Heilmeier Catechism” & how it impacts James’ leadership style (35:57)
• Rapid fire questions (39:30)

• CIA Guide to Analytic Tradecraft - Primer published by the CIA to assist analysts in dealing with the perennial problems of intelligence.
• American Prometheus - Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s definitive biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the iconic figures of the twentieth century, a brilliant physicist who led the effort to build the atomic bomb for his country in a time of war, and who later found himself confronting the moral consequences of scientific progress.

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.