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How Sin-Mei Tsai, Shippo’s VP of Engineering, Defines Code Quality

Version One Ventures

This time, I am very excited to introduce Sin-Mei Tsai , VP of Engineering at Shippo , a Version One portfolio company. Sometimes we find that the new code does not play well with old state, or with old code, which is a transient problem that happens during deployment.

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See More than 120 Speakers and Mentors at The Lean Startup Conference

Startup Lessons Learned

Another way to learn more about who’s speaking is to sort the conference program by category and find people addressing specific topics. He was a very early employee of Facebook , and engineering director there through the moment it blew up. Now he’s VP of engineering at Dropbox , where he’s seeing similar growth.

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Hiring Executives: If You’ve Never Done the Job, How Do You Hire Somebody Good?

Ben's Blog

The biggest difference between being a great functional manager and being a great general manager—and particularly a great CEO—is that as a general manager, you must hire and manage people who are far more competent at their jobs than you would be at their jobs. So, with no experience, how do you hire someone good? Probably none.

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Lessons Learned: What does a startup CTO actually do?

Startup Lessons Learned

So I initially gravitated to the CTO title, and not VP of Engineering. Instead, they find options and can communicate them to everyone in the company. Find the 80/20 - this was my favorite part of the job. I mean, have you seen other people? They might do anything ! But along the way, something strange happened.

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Lessons Learned: The hacker's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

Its common to find a hacker at the heart of almost any successful technology company. And we cant hire new engineers any faster, because you cant be interviewing and debugging and fixing all at the same time! Even with the highest standards imaginable, theres no way to hire just genius hackers. Just change it.

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What is a CTO?

Austin Startup

A CTO will guide your product strategy, market validation, architectural decisions, process optimization, recruiting, and hiring. A CTO’s real value is in finding opportunities with asymmetric payoffs. They adopt, measure, and manage key product performance metrics. A CTO must be able to build an effective team.

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Scaling is Hard, Case Study: TripAdvisor

Seeing Both Sides

I first met Steve when he was VP of Engineering at Centerline software, a software development tools startup, and I was a junior in college. Kaufer originally hired writers to product professional reviews and allowed user reviews on a whim. Scaling Lesson 1: Focus On Finding A Great Business Model.