Equivalent to Magic
12 episodes - English - Latest episode: almost 3 years ago - ★★★★★ - 23 ratingsEquivalent to Magic is a podcast about the wizards behind the world’s most influential companies and tech platforms. Two veteran tech executives, Steve Herrod and Quentin Clark, talk with CTOs, CPOs, and engineers about how they dreamed, designed and managed their way to scale. The show is produced by General Catalyst.
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Episodes
Atlassian CTO Sri Viswanath on Maximizing Innovation
July 06, 2021 11:40 - 40 minutes - 37.1 MBOver the last two decades, Atlassian has become the leading creator of enterprise project management software. Its suite of tools include Jira, Confluence and Trello -- products that guide the workflows of many Fortune 500 companies. Sri Viswanath has been CTO at Atlassian for more than 5 years. He’s a deep thinker who’s comfortable inside complex adaptive systems. And he’s constantly tweaking his technical team’s process to spark continued innovation. “If you improve 1% a day, You're 37 t...
Snowflake’s Christian Kleinerman on Breaking Limits of Data Warehousing
February 15, 2021 16:25 - 32 minutes - 29.8 MBIn this episode: Christian Kleinerman, senior vice president of product at Snowflake. Snowflake is a pioneering data warehouse platform that helps companies make sense of massive amounts of information in the public cloud. It currently manages 250 petabytes of data. It runs 515 million daily workloads for customers across finance, health care, government, education, manufacturing and more. It raised a billion and a half dollars from investors, including Salesforce and Berkshire Hathaway....
GitLab’s Eric Johnson on Radical OpenCore Transparency
February 03, 2021 14:53 - 32 minutes - 29.8 MBIn this episode, we’re talking to Eric Johnson, the EVP of Engineering at GitLab. Eric oversees a distributed team of engineers at GitLab, which is one of the world’s biggest all-remote companies. And no, it’s not covid-remote -- the company is natively remote, with 1,200 people across 67 countries. GitLab is an open-source DevOps platform that makes software development faster and easier. It has over 100,000 customers serving millions of users. We’ll hear from Eric about the technical cu...
Dropbox’s Akhil Gupta on ‘Brutal Prioritization’
December 10, 2020 17:42 - 40 minutes - 38.3 MBThis week’s episode is all about magic pockets, nickels, cupcakes, and brutal prioritization. It’s a conversation with Akhil Gupta, the general manager and VP of enterprise at Dropbox. Before that, he was the VP of engineering and the head of infrastructure -- running a 500-person engineering team that helped create the technical foundation for the Dropbox we know today. Steve and Quentin will talk with Akhil about how Dropbox scaled reliably from 2,000 users in 2008 to hundreds of million...
Nick Caldwell, Twitter's VP of Engineering
November 18, 2020 20:39 - 37 minutes - 34.1 MBIn this episode, we talk with Nick Caldwell, the VP of Engineering at Twitter. Nick joined Twitter over the summer, after a long career building enterprise products. He now leads a team of 700 engineers on the consumer side. That presented him with a very different set of daily challenges. “Enterprise versus consumer is a very different mindset and approach that I see people struggle with if they aren't comfortable with it. But enterprise, if done correctly, is more like chess. Consumer p...
Intuit CTO Marianna Tessel on AI-First Software
November 10, 2020 19:53 - 33 minutes - 31 MBIn this episode, we speak with the Chief Technology Officer of Intuit, Marianna Tessel. Marianna is a seasoned tech executive who oversees all of Intuit’s product engineering, data science, information technology, and information security teams. Marianna previously led engineering teams at Docker, Ariba and VMWare. She landed at Intuit in 2017. Intuit makes a range of software products for taxes and business management, including TurboTax, Quickbooks and Mint. And she’s leading thousands ...
David Hahn on Building Product LinkedIn, InstaCart, and GoFundMe
November 10, 2020 19:53 - 45 minutes - 41.6 MBIn this episode, we talk with David Hahn, the former CPO of Instacart. Throughout his career, David has learned deep and meaningful lessons about what individual and enterprise customers need -- and how to translate those needs into fun, usable products. His resume includes a wide range of successful tech startups. So we asked him what ties those experiences at LinkedIn, GoFundMe and Instacart together. “I think there's some times where people look at kind of growth work and say, ‘Oh, g...
Jay Parikh on Scaling Facebook's Data Centers
September 28, 2020 17:37 - 40 minutes - 37.5 MBIn this episode, we speak with Jay Parikh, Facebook’s outgoing VP of engineering. Jay is the architect behind Facebook’s data center infrastructure who helped design and execute the physical layer that underpins the platform. "We came together and had this big meeting and decided 'Okay. Well, we have to go and build our own infrastructure.' We had really no choice given the fact that we were scaling so rapidly. And we started to just struggle with the off-the-shelf kind of solution...
Jay Parikh on Scaling Facebook's Infrastructure
September 28, 2020 17:37 - 40 minutes - 37.5 MBIn this episode, we speak with Jay Parikh, Facebook’s outgoing VP of engineering. Jay is the architect behind Facebook’s data center infrastructure and engineering teams, who helped design and execute the physical layer that underpins the platform. "We came together and had this big meeting and decided 'Okay. Well, we have to go and build our own infrastructure.' We had really no choice given the fact that we were scaling so rapidly. And we started to just struggle with the off-the-shelf ki...
Slack CPO Tamar Yehoshua on Humanizing Software
September 28, 2020 15:15 - 40 minutes - 37.1 MBIn this episode, we're speaking with Tamar Yehoshua, the Chief Product Officer at Slack. We’re talking about designing products for the future of work, today. The pandemic injected a lot of urgency at Slack, which saw user growth explode after millions of people suddenly started working from home. We’re still sorting through how this mass-remote work culture will impact workplace collaboration -- and Tamar’s team is thinking deeply about how to better serve this new world in a human way. ...
Former Uber CTO Thuan Pham on 'Violent' Growth
September 28, 2020 15:06 - 42 minutes - 38.7 MBIn our very first episode, we’re talking to Thuan Pham, the former CTO of Uber. Thuan is the longest-serving executive at Uber. He started there in 2013, when ride-sharing was in just a couple-dozen cities. He left in May of this year, when Uber is in more than 900 cities and booking billions of rides per quarter. Thuan will tell some harrowing tales about keeping Uber’s systems running as the popularity of ride sharing exploded. "Hyper growth and exponential stuff seems fun to talk abou...
Introducing Equivalent to Magic
September 28, 2020 14:56 - 1 minute - 1.56 MBJoin Former Dropbox CTO Quentin Clark and Former VMWare CTO Steve Herrod as we go deep with the people making tech work at the most successful and cutting-edge companies -- to learn what they do, how they solve problems, and how they build and lead engineering teams.