Lewis - Kevin Goldsmith - Journey to CTO

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Introduction:
There's a huge amount of diversity required from one CTO role to another;

The job function changes wildly depending on the size of the company, headcount, business needs, etc.

In this week's podcast, Lewis Adams-Dunstan talks to Kevin Goldsmith, who has recently joined Anaconda, Inc. as the CTO.

With 25 years' experience, managing teams of 100+ people at global brands such as Microsoft, Adobe, and Spotify, we can't think of anyone better to advise on what's required to be a successful CTO.

He also shares his recent experience of joining a business as a new CTO.

In this podcast, Kevin and Lewis cover:
✅The journey to becoming a CTO
✅Planning your career strategically
✅The skills required to make a great CTO
✅What it's like joining an established team as a new CTO ✅Advice for businesses that are looking to hire a tech leader.

You don't want to miss this one.

Click this link to listen to the podcast now: open.spotify.com/episode/2zaTQ5J18HUirZpTuVrpsI

Transcription:
Lewis: Well, I know you're no stranger to these kind of interviews, so I'm very excited to learn a little bit from you as well. Look, some of the topics we're hoping to cover are going to be a look into your journey through tech, hoping to understand what skills are needed to become a great CTO. I'm very keen in fact to understand what it's like joining an established company or an established team as a new CTO what those first few months look like and then, hopefully, providing the best practices, some advice to aspiring CTO's or businesses who are actually looking to hire senior-level technical leaders. And obviously, this is a pretty rare opportunity. So, as always, with my shows, which are normally on Thursday at 11, this is one we threw in here. We have a lot of Q&A throughout. So if there's something specific you want to know, feel free to ask away and we'll post up the questions here on the live. But I'm looking forward to the chat. And you had a fantastic start, you've been in the industry for many years. Maybe you can talk us through kind of your journey. of where you've been and where you are now.

Kevin: I'll try and do the reasonably short version. So, yes, I went to school for computer science back in the last century. And when I graduated back then, there weren't a tonne of startups. It was pretty much just big companies. And I was very much into graphics in university. And so I went to go work for a company called Silicon Graphics, which was focused on building computer graphics hardware. And so I was very lucky to find a role with one of the bigger companies doing the stuff I cared about and that happened to be in the Bay Area. So then I was now in the Bay Area. I did that for a little bit. I went from there to a film and picture film and TV studio to do computer graphics for TV shows and motion pictures. And that was sort of an interesting time as these new studios, that technology was becoming more accessible and all these new studios were popping up. And some of these more established studios, like the one I worked at, were struggling a little bit around price and things like that. The studio didn't do too well. I ended up going to Microsoft Research, so I joined Microsoft literally, I think the week or two before Windows 95 shipped. So I joined Microsoft Research right as it started. And that was a cool time to be there because, yes, it was really, early. They were building a new graphics group. I got to hang out with the people who wrote my textbooks at college and things like that, which was awesome. I spent several years there and then decided I wanted to be closer to actual product development, joined the Windows Media team, which at the time, you know, streaming was just really getting started. Real was out. Windows Media was going. I did that and during this time, all the startups were going on and this was the kind of dot-com explosion. And I decided, you know, after having been at a company, when I joined Microsoft in the year, there were maybe eighteen thousand people, which was a big company. But when I left in 2000, it was 80,000 people.

So I went from that to a company that was about 50 people. So I really wanted to do something a little bit different. Then the dot-com bust happened. So that start-up went down. My next startup, I started a startup with some people. That startup went down. We couldn't find any money, went back to Microsoft, was there for a couple of years, and the Windows CE team. And then Adobe called. I went to Adobe and I was very, very lucky. Adobe was a really great company to work for. I very much enjoyed my time there. Prior to that I would be a senior developer or I'd be a lead or sometimes I was a manager, sometimes I was a developer. I kind of went back and forth.

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