Modern CTO

Today, we're talking to Mohak Shroff, former SVP of Engineering at LinkedIn. We discuss why the smartest use of AI agents is giving professionals more agency rather than replacing them, how delegating to an agent should look a lot like onboarding a new hire, and what it takes to build the thing that was impossible before instead of making the familiar 20% better.

Everyone's arguing about whether AI will replace 90% of your job. Steve Orrin, federal CTO at Intel, says that's the wrong number to even be worried about. We discuss how a $25 million deepfake of a bank's own CFO exposed a whole new category of cyberattack, why sprinkling "AI pixie dust" on a problem doesn't actually solve anything, and why, thirty years into being a CTO, his best advice still comes down to surrounding yourself with people smarter than you.

Today, we're talking to Ben Fox, founder of Ben Fox Coaching. We discuss why financial independence alone rarely convinces a burnt-out engineering leader to actually quit, how leaving a toxic job works the same way as leaving a toxic relationship, and why senior engineers reduced to babysitting language models are quietly heading for the exits.

All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast!

Today, we're talking to Seth Godin, author of This Is Strategy. We discuss why strategy is a philosophy of becoming rather than a plan to execute, how status, affiliation, and freedom from fear quietly drive almost every decision people make, and why one of Seth's biggest professional failures came down to having a good idea and then walking away from it.

A barrel of uranium holds as much energy as two million barrels of oil, and Matt Loszak, co-founder of nuclear startup Allo, thinks that's just the beginning. In this episode, Joel talks with Matt about building factory-made nuclear reactors as safe as a university research reactor, why we're entering a "second atomic age," the team and funding behind Allo, and how small modular reactors could solve the massive power problem facing Microsoft, Google, and Amazon's data centers.

Today, we're talking to Ajay Nair, General Manager of Elasticsearch and Platform at Elastic. We discuss why most AI hallucinations are really a search problem wearing a scarier name, how the industry's obsession with model selection is missing the real bottleneck of context and retrieval, and why the biggest failure mode in enterprise AI is mistaking a working demo for a production system.

All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast! 

Today, we're talking to David Selinger, founder and CEO of Deep Sentinel and co-founder of Redfin. We discuss why he's convinced that virtually every home security tool on the market does nothing to actually stop a crime, how a crossbow-wielding intruder on his own driveway became the ultimate test of that theory, and why he'd rather protect his family with a blurry camera and a real person behind it than a flawless 4K feed with nobody watching.

Today, we're talking to Jason Silbergleit, Head of Americas at Classiq. We discuss why the biggest risk in quantum computing isn't moving too early but waiting too long, how the ChatGPT moment offers a preview of the disruption still coming, and why the real competition in quantum isn't about hardware but about who builds the software layer that makes it usable.

Today, we're talking to Desikan Madhavanur, Chief Technology and Product Officer at Capital One Software. We discuss why the cloud has quietly resurrected the same data problems companies thought they'd solved decades ago, why the average enterprise tool now survives just 12 to 18 months, and why understanding customer need will end up mattering more than any single technical skill.

Today, we're talking to Manda Miller of Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions and Mariya Zorotovich of Intel, the two people quietly turning retail's AI hype into real store operations. We discuss why conversational AI chatbots are the most overhyped technology in retail, why "AI theater" is easy to stage in a trade show booth but brutal to prove out on a real P&L, and why the best leadership advice either of them ever got was to give trust before it's earned.