CTO School is only for lead and senior developers.  Non-developers will be removed from RSVP lists. 

This program is generously hosted by Skylabs and OneReceipt.com.

Sessions are near Battery Park at Skylabs - One State Street Plaza on the 22nd Floor.

Next Session:

11/9 @ 6:30PM | Session #4 - Hiring & Scaling Your Team

Talk #1: Getting enough people in the top of the funnel - Vivek Sondera, co-founder of Rapleaf

Talk #2: Building an engineering culture - Kurt Schrader, VP of Engineering, Intent Media

Future Sessions

11/16 @ 6:30PM | Session 5 -  Key Technical Decisions

      
Talk #1: Creating a technology environment for building a startup

- Prototyping
- Development Tools Overview
- Key Technical Building Blocks You Should Know About

Talk #2: Key Technology Decisions

- Languages & Platforms
- Persistence
- Resourcing the product roadmap
- Off the shelf vs build it yourself

Past Sessions

10/10 @ 6:30PM | Session 1 -  Being the Tech Leader

Talk #1: Role of CTO

1:1 Conversation with Mark Uhrmacher, CTO of Ideeli

Mark Uhrmacher launched members-only retail site ideeli with co-founder Paul Hurley in 2007. Mark has been involved in start-ups since 2002, first developing the technical infrastructure and sales and marketing strategy for food manufacturer Expert Foods, then serving as chief technology officer for Attune.com, an online advertising startup. Mark began his career with the technical staff at Oracle, where he focused on developing video on demand and interactive television, and was a member of the committee that created MPEG compression technology. He’s also been with NetGravity and DoubleClick.

• Introduction to the role of CTO / VP Engineering / Tech Lead
• Progression of CTO Role as the company matures
• Working with Business Stakeholders
• Working with other members of the product team (and what to do if you don't have them)
• Product Managers, Domain Experts, UX / Designers, QA
• Being An Effective Part of the Executive Team
• Preparing for Failure (and Success)

Breakouts: 8 - 10 Experienced tech leads lead small group discussions on the challenges of leading a technical team

Liz Crawford, CTO of Birchbox

Jean Barmash, CTO of Energy Scorecards

Kurt Schrader, VP of Engineering, Intent Media

10/17 @ 6:30PM | Session 2 - Deployment & Operations

Talk 1: Infrastructure - Jereme Corrado, Systems Architect at Birchbox

- Picking hosting environment
- Server technologies - app servers, load balancers, proxies, caches, storage, etc.
- Disaster Recovery and Backups
- Running Production Systems

Talk 2: Scaling & Speed - Kiril Savino, CTO & Founder of Gamechanger Media

Kiril Savino has been doing startups on the East Coast since way before it was cool, and co-founded GameChanger Media with Ted Sullivan in 2008 to change the face of youth & amateur sports media.  A self-taught technologist, his earliest startup experience was as the first engineer at Higher One (NYSE:ONE), building software that grew to process billions of dollars in transactions.  He learned to scale by doing it, at Higher One, as a lead at DoubleClick (where traffic is measured in 10s of billions of impressions/day), as an engineer and later CTO of ShopWiki Corp (downloading & semantically processing 70+ million pages of unstructured HTML a day), and at GameChanger, turning 10s of thousands of baseball scorekeepers and hundreds of millions of events into a real-time media firehose.

- Creating realistic plans and understanding requirements
- Profiling your existing application and data stores
- Tips & Tricks

11/2 @ 6:30PM | Session 4 - Getting Technical Stuff Done (and Well)

Talk 1: Development Process - Peter Bell, CTO of Skinn.io

- Project Management for CTOs
- Quality Assurance
- Estimation

Breakouts: 8 - 10 Experienced tech leads available for Q & A on process and getting the most out of their teams