The San Francisco Startup CTO Summit
Tuesday October 21st 9.30am-5pm
Neo, 717 Market Street, The Gallery, San Francisco 94103
The Startup CTO Summit Series brings together local CTOs and engineering leaders from high growth companies to connect and learn from each other. At our inaugural event in NYC we had presentations from the CTO’s of companies including Gilt Groupe, MongoDB, Warby Parker, Birchbox, Art.sy and the VP Eng of Tumblr.
We’re looking for great presenters for the summit. If you’d like to present, please fill out this form.
The summit is for experienced CTO’s. We’ve read the books and skimmed the blogs. We’re not looking for background, introductory material or the basics. We’re looking for hard won lessons from your experiences over the last 2-3 years. if you wouldn’t have been surprised by your own presentation two years ago it’s probably not advanced enough! There should also be actionable insights - something we can do with the information that you provide.
Topics can be anything from highly technical to pure soft-skills. If it’s something a CTO or an engineering manager would be interested in, it’s probably a fit. We often have presentations covering process, culture, hiring and managing as well as architectural and technical topics. Pick something you’re passionate about. Life’s too short to tell uninteresting stories!
I’m happy to work with you to craft the titles and abstracts if you have ideas but don’t have the perfect language or you’re not sure which topic we’d prefer. Feel free to submit multiple rough ideas and we’ll help you to pick the best talk. If you’re interested but getting writers block, ping
peter@pbell.com and we can do a quick Skype or hangout to figure out what the coolest story might be.
Some example titles from the NY summit. Think of these as inspiration - not limitation:
- Micro-services: Lessons learned from scaling Gilt
- Unleashing our engineers
- When to throw away code
- Pair programming or pull requests
- Fast + predictable - how axial builds products
- First kill all the product owners
- Practicing failure - gamedays on the Obama campaign
- The value of volunteering
- Creating an adaptive culture
- Build it, change it, break it, fix it: shaping culture against a backdrop of rapid growth
- Competing cultures - how to interface with the rest of the business
- Finding your secret weapon in hiring
- Promoting vs. hiring engineering managers in flight
This call for paper closes on Friday October 10th, but we’re accepting speakers on a rolling basis, so fill it out ASAP as we hope to have most of the speakers locked in the next week or so. Email me at
peter@pbell.com if you have any questions about the conference or the CFP. Feel free to pitch multiple titles/abstracts and we’ll just pick the one that fits best.
