Scaler Pod - The Software Engineer's Podcast

In this episode of Scaler Pod, we have Nirdosh Chouhan SVP of Engineering at OYO, Chouhan is an aspiring leader in software engineering with over 20 years of strategic growth experience in managing teams, and distributed enterprise products and applications, and previously worked in companies like Apple, Oracle, and NetApp.  

An alumnus of IIM Bangalore, he's leading OYO's Platform and Revenue Technology with a team of 150+ engineers and had worked on building products for OYO to support Pricing, Invoicing, Availability, Booking, Payments, Communication, and Identity. 

In this Podcast, he shares his experiences in silicon valley and working at Apple, about the hospitality industry and new innovations happening, and the Indian Jugaad culture/ mindset.   

Timeline:  

00:00 Teaser 

02:34 Introduction  

03:02 Day in the life of Nirdosh 

05:44 His journey in the tech industry and early days 

17:00 Engineering in OYO and tech challenges in the hospitality industry 

21:25 Arnav's experiences while working in Zomato  

22:45 OYO's diversified market 

26:30 Custom filters and challenges with large data 

30:09 Changes in hospitality and product functioning 

34:20 His learnings while working at Apple 

38:10 Global business spread and customer satisfaction 

40:50 Work culture, hiring, and feedback 

45:00 Challenges for engineer's growth in India 

48:02 Thoughts on the Indian tech ecosystem 

50:10 Future of the Hospitality industry and catering experiences  

54:09 New changes and possible technological ways for engineers  

59:39 The India Jugaad mindest, Ipad launch, and the difference between India and the silicon valley 

01:11:00 Advice for young engineers/ freshers 

01:14:28 Outro

In this episode, we have Prasanna Sankar the CTO and Co-founder of Rippling.com, which is currently valued at $10B. Prasanna had also co-founded companies like LikeaLittle, a campus social network that grew from 0 to 20M page views in 6 weeks.  

He is a two-time world finalist at Google Code Jam and ACM ICPC and held the rank one position at TopCoder while in college. After moving to the US he worked with companies like Microsoft and Zenefits but was always curious about real-world problem-solving and building startups.   

Listen to this Podcast where he shares his encounters with 6 sigma events, startup experiences, raising funding from major VC firms like Ycombinator and a16z, stories with Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, and his belief in blockchain technology for a better-decentralized future. 

Timeline: 

00:00 Introduction

00:43 Understanding 6 sigma events

02:21 How he started with TopCoder

06:50 Microsoft, Interactions with Paul Graham(Y Combinator) and his first Startup

19:30 About Like a Little and hyper-growth

23:47 On turning down offers from Google and Facebook, investment with a16z

29:04 Failures and Downfalls while building startups

34:46 Zenefits story

42:35 How rippling started and engineering culture

47:42 Managing large tech teams and his learnings

59:40 His first principles

1:03:25 6 sigma events in current times and Blockchain Technology(Crypto)

1:12:35 On Decentralization, cryptocurrencies, and Uniswap

1:17:53 His Optimism, beliefs, and life experiences

1:22:19 OpenAI and the Elon Musk story

1:27:47 Outro

In this episode of Scaler Pod, we have Akash Saxena who is the CTO at Hotstar and previously has been with OpenTable for about 12 years. Currently, he focuses on building & scaling Disney+ Hotstar to reach millions of users across the globe and to provide entertainment through digital content and live sports streaming. 

As the ICC T20 World Cup is on the line, let's talk with him about Cricket, Ind vs Pak games, Handling Live Streaming for Scale, and the Future of OTT Platforms in India.

#Hotstar #ScalerPod #Podcast #Scaler

Timeline:

00:00 Introduction

00:52 A day in the life of Akash Saxena

04:33 On his journey before Hotstar

15:57 Getting started with Hotstar, Initial days, and Ind vs Pak

20:55 Making an Inhouse streaming platform and overcoming challenges

25:50 Preparing for massive scale and his F1 racing approach

36:23 Handling live buffer and delay latency

42:45 Concurring distribution and video quality

48:17 Optimizing user data and team culture

56:50 Building Watch and Play on Hotstar, Microservices

1:05:13 Scaling tech teams in Hotstar

1:15:55 Hiring requirements for the tech team

1:19:55 Advice for young people building their own Startups

1:26:06 Leadership approach, crisis management, and being customer first

1:35:41 Arnav tells about challenges he faced while his early startup days

1:37:49 Importance of modeled testing

1:40:58 Thinking for the engineering team and planning for their growth

1:47:31 Advice for freshers and about personal growth

1:56:23 Use of AI, Machine Learning in Hotstar, and the future ahead

2:02:49 Vastness of content and geographical diversification

2:06:18 Hotstar Multiplex and how watching movies is changing

2:09:35 Future of media and OTT content domain

2:12:27 Outro

At FamPay, Shobhit is helping build infrastructure to handle millions of transactions and delight the young generation with new experiences. He talks about his journey starting from being an Engineer at Goldman Sachs, working through big tech companies like Microsoft and Amazon, trying hands at a startup to working at Whatsapp. He also discusses some of the challenges they are solving.

Timeline:

00:00 Introduction

#Fanpay #Scaler #Podcast

Dr. Kailash Nadh, Zerodha's CTO is famous for his countless side projects on his GitHub, his blog that thousands of software engineers follow, and for building the tech infra at Zerodha that is run by only 35 engineers but supports over 1 crore traders! Let's talk with him about hacker culture, working on open source projects, and how to scale up tech and tech teams with common sense.

At Dukaan, Subhash and his cofounder Suumit are building the e-commerce infrastructure on the edge of the cloud for the next billion! Dukaan lets anyone build their online store in minutes, and Subhash talks about their journey from SEO optimization to building a Shopify challenger over the last decade and how their team is surmounting challenges of extremely low latency page loads of shops on slow mobile internet connections across the globe! 

#scalerpod #dukaan #podcast 

TimeStamps 

00:00 Teaser 

01:50 Introduction 

02:50 Day in the life of Subhash 

15:00 Young software engineers today

21:30 Making software reliable, and improve UX for users 

24:30 How engineers work and work-life balance 

27:00 How do you hire people ?

31:00 Subhash's early career experience 

36:30 Job security, hiring and firing 

42:00 Early SEO optimisation as freelancer

52:00 Meeting cofounder Suumit Shah 

01:00:00 Building the first product company

01:04:00 Early idea of Dukaan from whatsapp-commerce 

01:16:00 Expanding on SaaS offerings 

01:20:00 Mindset of SaaS in India

01:24:30 Better CDN and Edge-level low latency content

01:32:00 Building an edge-computing stack 

01:52:00 Edge level SSL, domain handling over BGP and anycast

02:00:00 Maggi Delivery Network (don't miss this!) 

02:15:00 Competing with Shopify 

02:19:00 Mobile-first D2C commerce shop pages 

02:26:00 Innovating hiring strategy at Dukaan

02:36:00 Work Environment at Dukaan

02:39:30 Stress Free Zone at Dukaan office 

02:43:20 Conclusion

Jacob is a seasoned tech leader in the startup world, having been CTO of  Grofers (now Blinkit) and has also spent a stint at Sequoia as  CTO-in-residence.  He now works with CTOs, CPOs and their teams to be a sounding board for  their ideas, and help grow the cultures and systems they dream of.

00:00 Teaser

01:42 Introduction 

02:05 Life in a day of a CTO

05:00 Peacetime vs Wartime CTO 

06:50 Challenges for a CTO at different startup stages 

10:00 Tech vs Business

14:30 What motivates engineers?

19:00 How EMs can keep their teams engaged ?

24:30 Why Engineers should focus on writing?

30:00 Importance of conferences, blogs and open source participation

35:00 Developing the art of communication and documentation

38:30 Personal Branding for Software Engineers 

43:00 Open Source contributions and hiring via open source

45:00 Role of Public Speaking in Jacob's career 

49:00 Importance of Developer Advocacy 

52:00 Engineers can smell bullshit

54:30 How can one move into Developer Relations?

58:30 How is the 2022 downturn/recession playing out? 

1:00:30 Things that will still grow despite the downturn 

1:03:00 Advice to budding tech entrepreneurs

1:06:00 Emergence of Vertical SaaS

1:08:00 ML/AI and generative tool applications

1:10:00 Pains of Mobile Developer experience 

1:13:00 What's next for Jacob in life? 

1:14:25 Jacob's passion for early child education

Welcome to the SCALER Pod series! In this first episode, we have Arnav Gupta (Product & Strategy, SCALER) in conversation with Jitendra Agrawal, Global CTO, CARS24. They discuss about engineering management, scaling up of engineering teams and importance of mobile development.

Timelines  

 00:00 Teaser 

 01:30 Introduction  

02:00 Day in the life of a CTO 

 05:30 Tech Team Structure of different sized companies 

 08:00 Working on B2B vs B2C tech 

 11:00 Tech Teams communicating with Business/Products 

 12:30 Jiten's career story so far 

17:00 Key ingredients to hire and retain a great tech team 

23:00 Career choices for mid-senior engineers 

 28:00 Being 'language-specific' in hiring 

 35:00 Importance of Mobile Engineering

About Amod Malviya:   

0:00:00 Teaser      

0:02:00 Intro      

0:02:26 Why do you still continue to code ?      

0:07:50 You were making weekend dev challenges on Twitter. Why did you stop?      

0:14:25 What motivates engineers go deep into systems and languages?       

0:18:00 What is your advice for engineers who are overwhelmed with multiple languages, tech stacks and frameworks to learn?      

0:24:40 How to transcend from thinking in a framework to thinking in a concept?      

0:30:20 What is your advice for mid-senior engineers to grow in their career?      

0:41:00 How to take time out for learning when working at startups?      

0:47:00 Why is it important to keep learning throughout the career ?      

0:52:50 Should we learn Computer Science fundamentals? Or we can just start building projects?      

1:05:00 Learning for short-terma vs long-term goals?      

1:12:00 Importance of skills vs degrees      

1:25:00 How to create a peer group that helps you to learn?      

1:27:00 Should engineers think of going into Product Management?       

1:35:00 How to judge what is hype and what is subsstance when picking a new domain?      

1:55:00 How to discover, and get involved in good open source projects?      

2:00:00 Words of advice for engineers beginning their careers in tech