alphalist.CTO Podcast - For CTOs and Technical Leaders
von Tobias Schlottke - alphalist CTO Podcast
- alle zwei WochenErscheinungsrhythmus
- 1 h 05typische Länge
- vor 3 Tagenletzte Folge
This podcast features interviews of CTOs and other technical leadership figures and topics range from technology (AI, blockchain, cyber, DevOps, Web Architecture, etc.) to management (e.g. scaling, structuring teams, mentoring, technical recruiting, product etc.).
Guests from leading tech companies share their best practices and knowledge.
The goal is to support other CTOs on their journey through tech and engineering, inspire and allow a sneak-peek into other successful companies to understand how they think and act. Get awesome insights into the world‘s top tech companies, personalities with this podcast brought to you by Tobias Schlottke.
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#149 Governance Gives You Speed: Why AI Agents Must Earn Trust with Sri Viswanath // Founder & CEO @ Sycamore
Atlassian's first CTO explains why agents should never be autonomous on day one, why software starts decaying the moment you ship it, and how trust becomes the thing that lets enterprises move fast. What does it take to trust an AI agent wi
#148 Git Is the Wrong Tool Now: Rewriting the Social Contract of Agentic Teams with Raffi Krikorian // CTO @ Mozilla
Raffi Krikorian ran 600 engineers at Twitter and 1,000 at Uber. Now he thinks solo agentic coding has broken how teams build software, and that fixing it takes more managers, not fewer. Raffi Krikorian has built teams at scale: platform eng
#147 "Make It Secure" Isn't a Prompt: A L0pht Hacker on Securing AI-Written Code with Chris Wysopal // Chief Security Evangelist @ Veracode
Nearly three decades after telling the US Senate the internet could be taken down in 30 minutes, the L0pht veteran explains why AI has made attack sophistication meaningless as a signal, and why the real fix is giving your models security i
#146 AI Found What Nine Years of Security Research Missed with Charles Guillemet // CTO @ Ledger
Ledger's CTO on vulnerability discovery, security-by-design, key management and AI-native engineering. Charles Guillemet started hacking at 12. He sold his piano to buy his first computer. Nine years ago, he built Ledger's offensive securit
#145 "Harness Writing Is Not Hard": Build to Learn, Not to Run with David Soria Parra // Member of Technical Staff @ Anthropic
David Soria Parra on why he'd build a custom agent harness only to understand it, not to run it,and why the industry's MCP-vs-CLI debate misses the point entirely. BROUGHT TO YOU BY: Blocks Sponsored by Blocks: Save at least 20% on your AWS
#144 Writing Code Is No Longer the Job: Dana Lawson on Trusting AI Agents Like Self-Driving Cars // CTO @ Netlify
Why CTOs should stop asking whether they trust AI agents and start asking when that trust becomes automatic, and where human judgment still has to hold the line. Sponsored by Blocks: Save at least 20% on your AWS costs with AI-powered optim
#143 The Company Brain: How Kombo Runs on a Git Repo and a Cursor Agent — with Aike Hillbrands, Co-Founder & CTO @ Kombo
A GitHub repo, a Cursor cloud agent, and a public Slack channel replaced Notion AI at a $25M-funded HR integration startup, and became the whole company's shared brain. BROUGHT TO YOU BY: Blocks Save at least 20% on your AWS costs with AI-p
#142 Why LLMs Need Their Own Programming Language: From Assembly to AI with Vaibhav Gupta // Co-founder @ BAML
From HoloLens assembly to AI: Vaibhav Gupta on why LLMs need their own language, and how BAML makes them type-safe and shippable at agent speed. BROUGHT TO YOU BY: Blocks (https://blocks.cloud/alphalist?utm_source=alphalist&utm_medium=podca
#141 AI Pat Works Here Now: Why Agents Must Follow Human Rules with Pat Casey // CTO @ ServiceNow
ServiceNow's CTO of 20 years explains why the safest way to deploy AI agents is to treat them like employees, same rules, same approvers, same spending limits, and why AI is reshuffling the deck on who your best engineers are. Intro How do
#140 From Stripe's Fifth Engineer to Serving Millions of Developers with Anurag Goel // Founder & CEO @ Render Goel
Anurag Goel was Stripe's fifth engineer before he built Render into a platform millions of developers deploy on. Here's his contrarian read on agents, security, and why "the AI cloud" is the wrong thing to be. Show Notes Anurag Goel joined
#139 Your Future Job Is a Decision Inbox — Max Deichmann Built the Layer That Gets You There // Co-Founder @ Langfuse
Max Deichmann built Langfuse — the open-source LLM engineering platform acquired by ClickHouse — and explains why the engineer of the future isn't writing code, they're reviewing what agents did overnight. Max Deichmann didn't set out to bu
#138 From Hacker News to W3C: How One Amazon Engineer Accidentally Shaped the Future of AI Browsers // Alex Nahas, MCP-B
How a browser-based fix for an enterprise auth problem became a W3C web standard and what it means for how AI agents will interact with the web. Alex Nahas, founder of MCP-B and initiator of the WebMCP web standard, joins Tobias to explore
#137 - Only Three Search Engines Left Standing: One of Them Powers Your AI with JP Schmetz // Chief of Ads @ Brave
Thirty years building search infrastructure — and why the AI industry quietly depends on it. SHOW NOTES Jean-Paul Schmetz has been close to search infrastructure for nearly three decades — as founder of Clix, the European search engine that
#136 - AI Writes Code: Who Architects the Consequences? with Neal Ford // Software Architect & Author
Fitness functions, agentic guardrails, and why experienced architects matter more than ever in the AI era Show Notes: Neal Ford has spent decades thinking about how software systems hold together over time. In this episode, Tobias sits down
#135 - From Legacy to Innovation: Yahoo's Modernization & AI with Lee Zen // CTO @ Yahoo
Modernizing Yahoo in the private-equity era: legacy constraints, shipping velocity, and AI-native consumer products Yahoo is far more than a nostalgia brand—it’s a broad consumer platform operating at huge scale. In this episode, Tobias sit
#134 - From Inner to Outer Loop: Agentic Coding, Stacking PRs, and the Cursor Merger with Greg Foster // CTO @ Graphite
Solving the "Outer Loop" bottleneck: Agentic coding, Stacked PRs, and the future of the CTO role with Graphite's Greg Foster The "Inner Loop" of coding (typing syntax) has been solved by AI. The new bottleneck is the "Outer Loop"—reviewing,
#133 - Build the Learning Machine: AI Adoption, Flow Metrics, and the Future of the CTO Role with Eric Bowman
From “dangerously skip permissions” to the Andon cord: voluntary adoption, flow metrics, and how agents change what CTOs optimize for Partner Tradegate Direct: Europe’s most direct online broker – trade for free, efficiently, and directly o
#132 - Clarity Over Tooling: Velocity & Building Teams Without Drama with Loïc Houssier // CTO @ Superhuman Mail
From acquisition carve-outs to 100ms interaction rules: Engineering velocity through team clarity, not tool proliferation Partner TOPdesk: Discover the future of internal IT in the DACH region with the "Inside ITSM 2026" report – featuring
#131 - AI Product Strategy: When to Build and When to Wait with Matthias Keller // CPO @ Kayak
From Alexa to LLMs: Platform experiments, distribution challenges, and how AI is democratizing feature development in travel tech Tradegate Direct: Europe's most direct online broker – trade for free, efficiently, and directly on the stock
#130 - From PhD Research to DuckDB: Building the Next Generation of Analytical DBs with Mark Raasveldt // CTO @ DuckDB
How single-node performance and embedded analytics are revolutionizing database architecture for modern applications Tradegate Direct: Europe's most direct online broker – trade for free, efficiently, and directly on the stock exchange. Tra
#129 - $32B Lessons: Building CTO Teams, Rapid Innovation, and Staying Customer-Connected with Solal Raveh
What Wiz's $32B acquisition teaches about scaling CTO teams, rapid innovation, and customer-centric leadership Tradegate Direct: Europe's most direct online broker – trade for free, efficiently, and directly on the stock exchange. Trade dir
#128 - From Tickets to Problems: Klaus Breyer // Head of Product & Technology @ Edding
From assembly lines to problem-solving teams: practical strategies for breaking development silos Here's the thing about agile transformations: they almost never work the way they're supposed to. Teams end up more siloed than before, chasin
#127 - Kelsey Hightower's Unfiltered Truths: 25 Years of Infrastructure, DevOps, and Retiring at 42
Unfiltered lessons on infrastructure, career strategy, and the art of knowing when to stop. What does 25 years in tech teach you? Kelsey Hightower, a self-taught engineer who rose to become a Distinguished Engineer at Google and a key figur
#126 - AI Transformation at Scale: Practical Adoption Across 150+ Engineers with Peter Gostev // Head of AI @ Moonpig
Navigating AI hype versus implementation reality in large engineering organizations The AI transformation challenge isn't just technical—it's organizational. Peter Gostev, Head of AI at Moonpig, discusses building practical AI capabilities
#125 - Two CTO Dinosaurs vs. Today's Tech Hype with Raz Shuty // CTO @ auxmoney
Unfiltered insights on microservices myths, cloud cost reality, and pragmatic technical leadership Two veteran CTOs tear down today's tech hype with brutal honesty and hard-won experience. Raz Schweiger-Shuty shares his controversial approa
#124 - The Path to AGI: Inside poolside’s AI Model Factory for Code with Eiso Kant
Building Human-Level AI for Code: Model Factories, RL at Scale, and Distributed Teams Technical Deep Dives: • Poolside’s model factory: end-to-end automation from raw data to production models • Scaling RL from code execution: 800,000+ cont
#123 - From Nokia to AI-IoT: Engineering the Physical World with Bernd Groß // CEO @ Cumulocity
Bridging operational technology and cloud architecture for industrial-scale systems The convergence of AI and IoT is reshaping how technical leaders approach industrial systems architecture. Bernd Groß, CEO and co-founder of Cumulocity, sha
#122 - Grid Control in Milliseconds: Engineering Energy Systems with Barbara Wittenberg // CTO @ 1KOMMA5°
Real-time system architecture lessons from the edge of the energy transition Technical infrastructure enables the modern energy transition. Barbara Wittenberg, CTO at 1KOMMA5°, reveals the engineering challenges behind connecting and optimi
#121 - Canva's Playbook: Scaling Teams, Tech, and AI with Adam Schuck // Senior Engineering Director @ Canva
Insights into hypergrowth, late-stage career frameworks, AI adoption, and the tech powering Canva's collaborative editor. In this episode, Tobi chats with Adam Schuck, Senior Engineering Director at Canva, a company that has scaled to over
#120 - AI's Singularity & Commoditization: Navigating Hype vs. Reality with Georg Zoeller // Co-Founder @ C4AIL
Debunking AI hype, exploring security risks, and strategies for CTOs in the age of rapid change. In this episode, Tobi talks with Georg Zoeller, Co-Founder of the Centre for AI Leadership and mercenaries.ai, about the turbulent landscape of
