Meet Lukas Sliwka, CTO @ Grindr on Keeping the Stack Tuned to 3.2 Million Daily Active Users

Devibe Podcast

We met with Lukas Sliwka, CTO at Grindr, in their West Hollywood office to learn more about what it takes both from the team and from his leadership to scale up a backed stack to meet 3.2 Million DAUs (Daily Active Users). We covered so many things, including: How the to scale the Grindr stack from 800,000 and to millions of DAUs and how a near crisis was handled over a holiday in a remote starbucks parking lot. We also learned how the combination of the performance and low maintenance needed to keep infrastructure in place made led Grindr’s engineering team to consolidate their databases to Amazon Aurora. On failure, we learned about Lukas’s thesis on failing fast, but almost as important, trusting the executive team to carry their message forward and ensure that the entire engineering team can fail fast and improve. We also learned lessons from a “big bang rewrite” decision, including its impact on new functionality and market competitiveness. We looked carefully at the evolution of Lukas’s leadership and how a management thesis that blends operations, culture and technology changes over time. In the beginning of Luka’s career at Grindr he focused on technology (ie still writing code) and as he matured, he focused more on operations (ie what processes and metrics), and as the team grew, he focused more on culture (ie pushing the button on every single technical hire for culture) On setting out for success (or failure), we learned what it takes to be successful at Grindr: curiosity and willingness to experiment and try new things. Carefully looking for this trait has allowed both new and veteran talent to adopt really quickly. On goal setting, we learned that a combination of practical planning and brute force has been a proven methodology for Lukas. For Lukas, goal setting starts the evening before by setting a few key objectives. Brute force is not natural but a necessity in order to execute on what needs to get done. We also learned how hitting the gym at 5:15 and waiting to check emails until after the workout sets a practical work life balance for Lukas. On luck, we spoke about how to stack the deck in your favor, particularly by investing into the right communities, such as meetups, and building the right relationships with interests that genuinely resonate. On balancing life interest such as motorcycling and relationships, Lukas reflects on mistakes he made early on by not putting a priority on delegation. We also covered how having a correctly well defined outcome helps to call it quits or a success. Squishy targets prevents making the proper risk assessments and analysis.