Parallel Engineering Paths, Culture Building & Co-Founding (part 1) with Viraj Mody & Tom Kleinpeter #34

The Engineering Leadership Podcast

We deconstruct two distinct career paths in engineering & leadership and a co-founder relationship 15 years in the making! Tom & Viraj share formative startup experiences that shaped their careers as a Principal Engineer & Eng Leader. Plus insights shaping their new company on assessing risk, dealing with open-ended problems, being decisive, & removing non-coding time for engineers

VIRAJ MODY, CO-FOUNDER & CTO @ COMMON ROOM

Viraj led engineering organizations at Convoy and Dropbox, helping both companies scale their teams and products. Viraj was also a founding engineer at Audiogalaxy, where he worked alongside Tom, which was acquired by Dropbox.

TOM KLEINPETER, CO-FOUNDER & CHIEF ARCHITECT @ COMMON ROOM

Tom was a Principal Engineer at Dropbox, and before that the CTO at Audiogalaxy and FolderShare, startups which sold to Dropbox and Microsoft, respectively. He’s also the co-host of The Downtime Project - https://downtimeproject.com/ a podcast that helps engineers learn from the Internet’s most notable outages.

SHOWNOTES

• The Beginning - How Tom & Viraj first met over 15 years ago (3:48)
• The Early Days - Microsoft, Tom’s start-up jump to Audiogalaxy, and why Viraj followed (8:55)
• Lessons in hiring and assessing risk at an early stage startup (15:07)
• ”Yo, I don’t even know how to use a Mac…” + other strong opinions & mantras from their early start up experience (24:07)
• What happens when you remove decision-making delays & non-coding time from an engineer’s schedule (29:03)
• What principal IC’s & engineering leaders have in common... “Your job is to be decisive!” (34:08)
• Takeaways (39:17)

Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at sfelc.com!