It's A Long Way To The Top If You Wanna CTO
summary
Practical roadmap about career tradeoffs: move between individual contributor and management is OK, stay technical via code reviews and industry engagement (conferences, blogs, ask if “should we use Kubernetes”); treat compensation as staged risk (cash now vs equity later, one speaker takes a cash cut for equity); titles vary by company scale — e.g. director roles may manage 100–800 people and VPs 1,000–3,000; examples include a GM role in Costa Rica, a CTO at Meetup, shifting from teams of 125 to 25, and joining Exos to dogfood breathwork, supplements and strength training for recovery.
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chapters (24)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:24Welcome
- 2:10Who do you want to be
- 8:12Optimize your career
- 8:50Optimizing for financial goals
- 9:40Optimizing for different things
- 11:22Stress about compensation
- 12:54Finding the right place
- 15:14How do you find sponsors
- 16:13Should I stay or should I go
- 16:25Culture and values
- 17:39Culture comes from the top
- 18:41The halo effect
- 20:31Titles
- 21:54Learning and Influence
- 25:52Use your network
- 26:52Never burn a bridge
- 27:51Living in the limelight
- 28:14Networking
- 29:26Teaching
- 31:26Storytelling
- 36:04Conclusion
- 40:05Exos
- 42:27Questions
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