The CTO Podcast

What is the key to company culture? Here to weigh in are three guests: Vidya Dinamani, Benji Koltai and Jerome Bonhomme. Vidya founded Product Rebels and AdAstra, Benji is the Co-Founder & CTO of  Galley Solutions, and Jerome is the CTO of American Specialty Health.
In addition to the topic of the key to company culture, we also talk about how to maintain a company culture in large and small companies alike. Also on today's CTO Studio, we talk about restaurants and food supply.
Join us to hear those topics and more on the 65th editiono of CTO Studio.
In this episode, you’ll hear:
What has the term "cultural fit" become a catch-all for? (5:30)
How do you keep your culture consistent as you grow? (21:40)
What are the back house operations and how is Galley helping this part of a restaurant? (25:30)
Why having clear values for your company matters to your culture. (34:15)
What is the "now, later, and future" concept? (44:10)
And so much more!

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How would you navigate growing and scaling your tech company from 30 million to 200 million? Now how would you do it if that growth happened in just one year? Our guest today has been through those exact trenches, and he’s here to share his experiences. 
Michael Singer is the EVP of Technology at Veyo and he joins Vidya Dinamani of AdAstra and Brant Cooper of Moves The Needle. We talk about Veyo’s tremendous growth and the challenges it brought, why they couldn’t really use agile approaches to their growth and much more. Join us for all the details on episode 64 of The CTO Studio.

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The second biggest purchase most of us will make is a car. Many people finance that purchase through the dealer, which means knowing the ins and outs of the car finance industry is important. Joining us to share her insider knowledge is Sonia Steinway of Outside Financial, of which she is the co-founder and president. 
On this episode with her, we go deep into car dealerships and the process of car buying, and how to know what you are signing when you agree to a car loan. Listen in for those topics and more on today’s CTO Studio.

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Two critical components in a start-up or any business are creating culture and productivity with your team. Joining us to share their experiences and sagacity is a roundtable of CTOs from the tech field: Robert Swisher of biproxi, Brant Cooper of Moves The Needle and Michael Young, technology management consultant.
Today we talk about engineering culture, product management, and KPIs. We also discuss the crucial question: how do you measure productivity? While no one has the final, definitive answer, everyone weighs in with perceptive knowledge. Join us to hear it on this edition of CTO Studio.

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One of the hottest topics in tech right now is our focus for today: the present and the future of data science.  
On this episode of CTO Studio, you’ll hear data science downloads from Christopher Keown who runs a local machine learning data science meetup in San Diego. You’ll also hear insights from Robert Swisher, who is the CTO of biproxi and Alex Balazs, the chief architect at Intuit.
We specifically discuss when you should be adding data scientists to your team, how the role of engineering in the data science environment of today, and why data science is actually very personal and very local. Join us for those discussions on episode 61 of CTO Studio!
Chris Keown
Chris Keown’s San Diego Machine Learning group
Kaggle
biproxi
Robert Swisher on LinkedIn
Alex Balazs’ blog at Intuit
Alex Balazs on LinkedIn
Alex on CTO Studio

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Are PR and positive publicity in tech two different things? Brian Jones will answer that question and more today. Brian is the CEO of Nuts and Bolts of PR and he is the master of all things positive messaging. He also happens to be one of our guests on this episode of CTO Studio.
Our other guests are Alan Leard, the CEO and founder of Limelight Health and Alex Balazs, the Chief Architect at Intuit. The four of us discuss what PR is and isn’t, and if it’s different from positive messaging and positive publicity. We also talk about what makes a good conference good and a bad conference bad. We cover a lot of ground in this episode so get ready to join us on today’s CTO Studio.
For more, check out 7ctos.com

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We try a brand new format this week with a group discussion.  Debbie Chen, PhD sits with a few geeks and talks about her mission to measure hydration in elite athletes.
Check out: hydrostatis.com
Also, find your peer group of CTOs: 7ctos.com
 

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There’s a misconception that people in tech aren’t big on networking and connecting socially. Our guest today has busted that myth and shows us the power of community building with CTOs.
Dr. Tony Karrer is one of the founders of the Los Angeles CTO Forum, and is also an inspiration to me. He’s built multiple start-ups, is currently the CTO of several companies and holds a doctorate from USC.
Listen in to hear his wisdom on the topics of community building, scaling up and scaling down and much more on today’s CTO Studio.
In this episode, you’ll hear:
What is a fractional CTO?
What lesson did he learn from scaling in the dot com era?
When do you know if you need a CTO?
Is there a way to ensure you find the right advisors?
How do you know if a CTO is a first class citizen of their C suite?
And so much more!
We begin today with Tony telling us how did the LA CTO forum came to fruition. There is a small group of people who founded it over a decade ago. Back when InfoWorld was running a national conference for CTOs and creating local CTO groups.
Doing so inspired a group of people - Tony included - to form their own local CTO group in the LA area. Originally there were 8 of them, and they would gather together to talk about their problems and get ideas from each other. Their original group met in 2001, and they've been growing ever since. In fact, they still help each other today. Tony tells us about how someone from within the group helped him deal with the recent GDPR updates.
We also talk about the ebb and flow of this group and how he decided to stick with this idea for so long. Of course, the core reason is that it provides to him tremendous value in return. While the group ebbs and flows, its core is always there and always strong. Staying in that core group doesn't feel like it's a chore for him: it's a great group of people who provide incredible value to each other and to the larger ecosystem.
And that commitment has paid off, they are a well-known group in and around Los Angeles. They’ve become so big they have also expanded to neighboring areas like Santa Barbara, Pasadena and Orange County.
Our next topic is TechEmpower: Tony was a CTO at two start-ups in the 90s and TechEmpower came out of those experiences. He would get excited about the strategy and how the company should leverage technology.  In both instances, he realized once things got going with the company there wasn't a whole lot of strategy left to execute.  Instead, it became all about coding.
He knew he was passionate about the strategy and wanted to do more of that, so he wondered how to make that happen. 
It was the tech boom at the time and everyone wanted to have a start-up. So he opted to do three of these at a time, and he quickly realized his next problem: he needed people to help him build those three start-ups and everything that went along with them.
Soon he had tapped out his pipeline of people, and was soon faced with the formidable task of hiring the right people. It seemed like a natural solution to build up a staff of his own. He was teaching Computer Science at Loyola Marymount University (LMU) all during this experience, As a teacher, his former students and currently graduating students were a natural resource. From there TechEmpower was born.
In its earliest days, TechEmpower was run out of a lab at Loyola Marymount.. Before long there were 10 people working at LMU's lab. This was during the summer so when the department head saw so many students working in the lab, he asked Tony what they were doing. Tony told him the truth, explaining he had provided them with some work experience opportunities. The department head took it in stride, but a week later a memo was issued saying no commercial enterprises were allowed in the labs at LMU! 
Tony followed the new ru

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Technology and the internet go hand in hand, as does the innovation both engender. Nowhere is this more apparent than with Nativo’s CTO Oded Cohen. He joins the CTO Studio to tell us what it is like to be innovating as a CTO in online advertising today.
We’ll also talk about why he’s a startup guy at heart, how Nativo continues to innovate their offerings while also building and scaling their teams. This is an in-depth talk about the world of online advertising, and how innovation from that world applies to every industry within tech today. Join us to hear it all on this episode of CTO Studio.  
In this episode, you’ll hear:
What does it mean to be a "startup guy"?
What's the difference between native advertising and banner ads?
Why advertising is still effective.
Does the paid wall approach work for all publishers?
What is the dirty secret of cloud storage?
And so much more!
Today Oded Cohen is the CTO of Nativo and is based in Los Angeles, but he is originally from Israel. He was working in an Israeli start up that went public, after which they were acquired by an American company. A few months later he was offered a job in Dallas in a more corporate setting. He took the job and moved his family to Dallas, but it didn’t take long for him to realize he is a start-up guy at heart.
What does he mean exactly when he says he is a startup guy? Oded explains he likes the excitement and fast-moving environment in which he can have a meaningful impact and embrace challenges. In bigger companies you often have to get approval for more things and you have to plan things out or execute on someone else's plan.
So with that realization he moved on about a year later and after exploring some options, he found Nativo and felt it was a good fit. He and his family moved to L.A where he joined Nativo as Senior Vice-President of Engineering. Today, he is the CTO.
When he joined there was no product, no marketing but there was an operations and there was sales. The engineering team was 7 people and everyone was doing multiple things. I asked him to expand on the sales aspect of what they were doing at the time - were they a consulting agency? 
Their business has two sides: one side is the publishers. They provide technology to publishers to help them monetize their site using native advertising (which is how they got their name, Nativo).
The other side is the advertisers (brands). So their sales team goes directly after advertisers to get them to run native campaigns across all sites that embrace their technology. Their platform also act as a supply side platform (SSP), which allows publishers to auction their inventory in real time and serve the highest paying ad onto their site, maximizing the yield for the publishers.
The idea behind native advertising (versus display banners) is to provide a better user experience for site readers by adopting the characteristics of the rest of site, or in other words being more “native to the site”. That means if you go to a particular site looking to read articles in a specific topic, you will be shown ads on similar topics, with a headline and an image promoting sponsored articles (or videos)
When you actually click on the sponsored content ad, you read the article on the same site (whereas banners will send you to some other site). With their sponsored content you stay on your original site giving you a true full native experience.
We then move on to to talk about what it's been like to be the CTO of Nativo and his teams there.
Going from SVP of Engineering to CTO hasn't been much of a change, according to Oded. He's now managing 40 people and working very closely with the VP of product and his team.
He's still a technical guy so he'll sometimes get involved in the coding. He might be even deploy some of the code himself, as

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We’ve seen the disruption of many markets in the last decade, so is healthcare next? It is and that disruption is already underway, according to our guest Unmesh Srivastava. Unmesh is the CTO of P3 Health Partners, and he’s been in the healthcare industry for over a decade so he knows where the industry has been, and where it is going in the future.
On this episode, we talk about his journey to becoming a CTO in the healthcare industry, what we can learn from even the most humble of jobs, and why he doesn’t see his tech team as different from the other teams in his organization. Join us for those topics and more on today’s CTO Studio.
In this episode, you’ll hear:
What is the currency you have to spend to build connection?
Why is connection the key to earning respect from your team?
How sales applies to every aspect of your organization.
What's a problem he often sees with technologists and tech leaders?
How do you build a team so your developers so they have a balance of business knowledge and development and coding?
And so much more!
Unmesh left India for the States in 2008 to pursue a Masters of Science in Engineering Management at Cal-State Northridge. His undergraduate degree is in electronics and communication engineering, but he's always been a people person and enjoyed the managing people aspect of projects.
2008 was the peak of the recession and no one was hiring, it was very different than how he imagined it would be! But he learned a lot as a result. His first campus job was being a cashier at Burger King, not a job he was entirely happy to have. 
Looking back he says it shaped him a lot. Now he sees the value in it: he had to talk to all different nationalities of people, and he learned the art of selling even though he was not incentivized to do that.
And the concept applies today whether you are working in a multi-billion dollar enterprise or a mom and pop shop: how can you sell your services and have the most positive impact on the organization you are working for?
This applies not just on the front line of the actual sale, but down to the way your team is built and managed, and how your product and/or service is built so your entire organization is sustained long-term. He shares how he's developed this, but the foundation was there from the way he was raised in his family (especially from his mother).
Also on today's CTO Studio, Unmesh continues this story by sharing why he saw graduating during a recession as an opportunity when a lot of other graduate students were delaying going out into the workforce. 
With six months to go before graduation, he left Burger King and the tutoring he was also doing to completely focused on preparing for interviews.
And after that preparation, he got a call from a management firm for an interview. He met with them, had a great interview and started working with them as a solutions consultant on their Kaiser Permanente account. That's how he got started in healthcare and how he realized this was the industry he wanted to work in.
For almost the next three years he was at Kaiser, a role he loved. His team was devoted to the next generation of products and builds for Kaiser, which was an amazing experience because Kaiser is one of the most innovative healthcare delivery systems in the world.
From there he went to Toyota (still as part of the management consulting firm he was hired by after graduation), where he learned everything about business process management. He learned how to use Six Sigma and use process mapping to solve problems.
Even though he loved what he was learning with Toyota, he realized his passion was in healthcare. So he moved to North American Medical Management, which is part of Optumcare.
He was with them for 6 years until very recently deciding to move to a smaller organ

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