Geeks Who Lead Podcast

This week I interviewed Yoav Grossman, VP of Product & Engineering at Spinach.io about how they went about identifying potential use cases for LLMs within their product, spiking, implementing, and releasing an offering. It’s a great mini-case study of the steps involved in adding GenAI to a product thoughtfully, but quickly. 

Spinach is a smaller startup, but the lessons are applicable to companies of all sizes, and previously, Yoav was Head of Product for Asurion Health, Head of Global Business Process at Uber, and a manager for Walmart eCommerce.

Just before our CTO summits in May I got to chat with Mike Boufford, CTO at Greenhouse about his experiences in getting up to speed with GenAI and LLMs as a non-expert.

In this thought provoking interview Mike explains how he got up to speed with the capabilities of the latest LLMs and his thoughts on how CTOs should think strategically about engaging with Generative AI - both for improving the process of writing software and more broadly to rethink their product offerings and even their internal business processes.

Especially when building platform or infrastructure, sometimes it can be difficult for non-technical stakeholders to truly appreciate the value of the work being done.

In this interview, Gayatri Iyengar shares her experiences building platform solutions at both Uber and Doordash and how she used storytelling to connect business stakeholders with the real value that her org was delivering.

In this wide ranging discussion, I speak with James Turnbull, SVP Engineering at Sotheby’s about his approach to managing his costs during a downturn. From cloud spend and SaaS costs to prioritizing fewer projects and hiring globally, it’s a great insight into how a traditional enterprise is engaging with a tighter financial environment.

While there has been a major push to return to the office (by many managers and a good number of ICs), when remote is done right, it can reduce costs, provide access to a much wider talent pool, make teams more productive and scale more effectively (beyond a certain team size, every company is distributed). In this interview I chat with Mona Soni about her experiences running a distributed team at a larger company before, during and after the pandemic and some of the lessons she learned to get the maximum value out of a distributed engineering org. 

Do you still have doubts about the wisdom of leveraging LLMs in software development? Maybe you’re not sure how much they can help or how best to get started with them. Or maybe you’re well into the process of experimenting with LLMs for speeding up software development and you’d just like to compare notes?!In this fascinating interview I got to chat with Matt Welsh - Chief Architect and Co-founder of Fixie.ai about his practical experiences in leveraging Generative AI for software development, clearing up some common misconceptions along the way

Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Josh Nesbit (Founding Member, Widespread Care) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his work.

Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Jim O’Leary (VP of Engineering, Signal) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his work.

Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Sam Quigley (CEO, Kicho Inc) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his work.

Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Max Roser (Researcher at University of Oxford / Founder & Director of Our World In Data) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his work.