I’m happy to announce that I am hosting the first ever Austin CTO Summit on April, 10th at Capital Factory. I am partnering with CTO Connection and 7CTOs to bring the CTO Summit Series to Austin. I’ve been working closely with Peter Bell, president of CTO Connections and host of the NYC Nasdaq CTO Summit, to help coordinate all the logistics to ensure that the conference is a success. Peter has done a fantastic job of packing up the critical components for a successful conference, and I appreciate all he has done to help.
While Peter has essentially assembled a conference in a box, I’m coloring outside the lines and adding a unique Voltage Control spin to the event. I don’t want to ruin all the surprise, but the main idea is that I will create legitimate and meaningful networking opportunities and encourage thoughtful dialog through the conference.
The conference is for CTOs, VPs of Engineering, aspiring technical leaders, product manager, or anybody that wants to hang out with CTOs or better understand the CTO role. Most, if not all, of the speakers will be CTOs of recognizable companies. We will allow a few CEOs and other roles if the content is superb.
Mark your calendars for April 10 8AM-6PM and stay tuned for more updates!
The Official Announcement
Voltage Control has partnered with the popular CTO Connection summit series to bring this great event to Austin. This will mark the fifth year for CTO Connection’s CTO Summits, with summits in Austin on Tuesday April 10th and in San Francisco on Tuesday May 22nd. CTO Connection is also launching an online summit series with monthly presentations and a weekly email with articles and interviews with top engineering leaders.
The Summits
Whether you’re a team lead, engineering manager, VPE or CTO, at these full day, single track summits, you’ll learn the latest tricks other companies are using to successfully build and run engineering teams. It’s not hard to find a gathering of technologists debating front end frameworks, containerization or the relative benefits of Scala, Clojure and Go. Finding a group of geeks talking about the hard parts of building a successful engineering team is more challenging. Whether you want to hire smarter, refine your culture, improve your processes, manage more effectively or adopt better engineering practices or architectures, the CTO Summits are designed to help you to learn from top practitioners and to share experiences with your peers.
Over the last four years we sold out the summit series and presented over 200 amazing talks from senior engineering leaders representing companies including Twitter, Stripe, Snapchat, Coinbase, Chef, GitHub, Atlassian, MongoDB, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Groupon, Blue Apron, Tough Mudder, CustomInk, Spotify, Amazon, Condé Nast, Computech, comScore, Australia Post, Cisco and Oracle amongst many others.
What We’re Looking For
We’re looking for experienced engineering leaders willing to tell a 20 minute tale based on their recent experiences in building or running engineering teams. A great talk is:
- Novel
We’ve read the books and most of the blog posts. We get the benefits of Kanban, know the basics of orchestrating Docker using Kubernetes and understand the importance of building an engineering brand. Tell us a story that will provide new information to experienced engineering leaders who have the basics down cold. - Anecdotal
If you’re got data, that’’s even better, but the best talks are based on hard won experience building and managing your own engineering team. If you can abstract a theoretical framework to make sense of your experience that’s great, but we’re looking for stories based on experience, not untested theories. - Relevant
Is this relevant to or at least interesting to most engineering leaders. We love monads, but a talk on Haskell probably won’t be broadly appealing enough (unless it’s showing how to take the principles behind QuickCheck and apply them to other types of languages!) - Actionable
What will the attendees be able to do better by the end of the talk? There should be specific, actionable takeaways to help the attendees better build and run their teams. - Concise
Twenty minutes — back to back, including setup, tear down, and any Q&A. It’s a tight format but one that the attendees love as you have to get straight to the meat of the content. - Diverse
We’re committed to continuing to improve the diversity of our presenters and attendees. At our last summit over 40% of the selected speakers didn’t identify as male and 25% identified with ethnicities that are traditionally underrepresented in technology in the US. We are committed to a speaker lineup representing the diversity of gender, race and thought that we should expect in our community and are doing our very best to improve the diversity of our attendees as well. If you know anyone who might make a good speaker and would bring valuable diversity to the event, please feel free to email me — douglas@voltagecontrol.co I’m happy to connect personally and help them to plan and submit a presentation.
If you have multiple ideas for presentations, please feel free to make as many submissions as you’d like. If you’d like to get some inspiration for what kinds of talks are popular, check out our two most recent summits:
