Startup CTO Summit

Andrei Kasyanau

Introductory Speech

Rishab Nayak

Assembling a Kickass Founding Engineering Team

• Our hiring adventures, what worked, what didn’t?
• About hiring on story, pitch the company to them, gauge their interest, dedication, how important this is
• Hiring techniques and tips
• If not paying market rate, importance of explaining what equity is
• Importance of culture fit and cohesion
• Building a team from then on

Preet Raj

Building Technology That Adapts & Scales Easily with Product Market Fit

• Why Engineering Leaders & Engineers need to think about product market fit while building systems
• Working with the business to understand the “One Key Metric That Matters”.
• Importance of sharing that key metric with the entire engineering team to instill a sense of urgency and quality
• Helping the business pivot with the help of adaptable & scalable technology, if necessary, after finding the right product market fit
• These learnings helped us a lot when we pivoted from a B2C product to a B2B SaaS offering

Aman Naimat

Building an effective Data Science Organization

• How to structure culture and organization for success in data science?
• Who to recruit and attract data scientists? What to look for?
• How to approach getting to success in data science?

Sam Kann

Rebuilt your K-12 learning culture into an adaptable powerhouse

• Professional Development for teachers in a fast moving world and how technology can help
• Saas, IaaS, PaaS – how does it all come together
• Qualitative and Quantitative models
• Content Rich and Critical Mass
• Consolidation of administrative technology

Konstantin Vilk

Quantum threat and defense against it

• Understand and quantify the risks posed by quantum computing as it relates to them
• Understand how quantum computers work, what they are and how they are being used in the near future and expected to develop
• Understand the new processes in the industry, NIST and NSA leadership around cryptography and cryptographic standards
• Understand new methods of protection needed to be effective against Quantum as well as Classical threats to cryptography

Rachit Lohani

Scaling is hard but selling is harder

• You are seeing challenges scaling the people, tech, and processes.
• You see the problem and wonder why no one else is stepping up and taking the problem head on. Why are we stuck in the old way, why are we still talking about the past when the future is so clear.
• If you are seeing that, you have done a good job of identifying the issues, and now rather than scaling you need to do the selling.
• Next step is, selling your brand, your ideas, and concepts and making them theirs. You need to get out of the way and coach them from the sidelines, be their cheerleader their coach but not the problem solver.

Joseph Reth

The Singularity is Here(ish)

• Futurist, Ray Kurzweil predicts that the singularity-the time when the abilities of a computer overtake the abilities of the human brain-will occur in 2045 but what if I told you it’s already here in ways we could have never imagine.
• How ad tech is transforming our perception of people online and poisoning our societies.
• How LLMs like GPT-3 and Gopher aren’t true AGI but just good enough to trick the human mind.
• Why I think LLMs with the help of automation have already passed the Turing Test.

Leading and inventing as the CEO and CTO, for building the world’s best performing Augmented Reality glasses and platform from the chip level

A couple of points of my talk:

• CTO at an early stage growing startup, from the founding of Kura to now
• Running and growing a multi-disciplinary engineering and product team, from optics, chip, display, and software to design
• Inventions and unconventional decision making
• Company organization for scale
• Product market fit and working with customers
• Kura’s product and technology and business model

Ali Salhi

How LOOP built a $100M+ company using GCP

• Introduction to LOOP
• LOOP by the numbers (Journey and Team)
• The startup infrastructure needs
• Managed Services
• How does LOOP use GCP to satisfy those needs
• Conclusion

Lasse Andresen

Gather the right people and cool things will happen

• How to create a space to let cool things happen
• Who are the ‘best people’ and how to find and keep them
• Importance of your product/tech/service
• Disrupting and building
• Do you need a plan B
• Idea or execution

Julia Valentine

Successful Startups Build an Ecosystem

• Building the tech teams: 6 models you can use and how to choose the right one.
• What’s an agile business model and how to build it.
• How to speed up your design phase and be efficient with the build phase and the tool we see being used the most.
• How to pick the right advisors and what they should be able to do for you.
• Why successful startups build an ecosystem and how to do it.

Dmitriy Stepanov

Final word