Jacob Singh is a seasoned tech leader who has worked as the CTO of Grofers and CTO-in-Residence at Sequoia. In this podcast, he explains the challenges of building teams, scaling up, and making big strategic decisions. He discussed how a CTO’s role changes as a company grows, needing both technical and leadership skills. Jacob shares tips on motivating engineers with autonomy, mastery, and purpose, and improving team collaboration.
Educatekaro discovered these Key Points:
- Introduction and Life as a CTO: Insight into a day in the life of a CTO and the difference between peacetime and wartime CTO roles.
- Challenges at Different Stages: Discusses varying challenges CTOs face at different startup stages.
- Tech vs Business: Balancing technical skills with business acumen.
- Motivating Engineers: How autonomy, mastery, and purpose drive engineers.
- Engagement and Writing: Strategies for team engagement and the importance of engineers focusing on writing skills.
- Community and Personal Branding: The significance of conferences, blogging, open-source contributions, and personal branding.
- Public Speaking and Developer Advocacy: The role of public speaking in Jacob’s career and the importance of developer advocacy.
- Industry Trends and Future Directions: Insights into vertical SaaS, ML/AI applications, mobile developer experience, and Jacob’s passion for early child education.