Podcast #9: Camille and Kellan are Friends (and CTOs)
Podcast #9: Camille and Kellan are Friends (and CTOs)
This week Paul and Rich talk to two former chief technology officers (CTOs) who are also good friends and frequent collaborators: Camille Fournier, who was previously at Rent the Runway, and Kellan Elliott-McCrea, who was previously at Etsy. They discuss the role of the CTO within a company, share experiences from the trenches, compare their experiences managing engineers versus managing CEOS, and swap stories about the most colossal technical outages that happened on their respective watches (Kellan took down Yahoo Messenger [literally]; Camille ruined everyone’s Thanksgiving [well a network switch was reconfigured, it was a bad day]).
Rich: Can I make an impression on Kellan in fifteen minutes?
Paul: When a man’s been the CTO of Etsy do you think you can easily make an an impression? Think about what he’s seen.
Camille: People are hard, but I would say the hardest part, at the end of the day, is the executive part of the job. I think it’s dealing with the CEO, dealing with the board, dealing with the other executives. Trying to both protect the engineering team and keep it — you know, engineers are fragile creatures, and they want to be coddled, and they have their needs, and you want them to be happy because they’re so hard to hire, but also the business has things that need to get done, and you’re constantly the person that kind of feels like they’re in between those two worlds. That’s not all of it—but to me, that was definitely a huge part of it, being stuck in the middle of all those negotiations.
Kellan: The best CTOs are that bridge between the executive function and engineering function. And if you’re at a tech start-up you probably have the largest org, you certainly have the most expensive and sort of needy organization, and you’re both the site of — like I said, you’re a major expense for the company — but you’re also the site of what differentiates the company, and you’re trying to build something special. There’s a reason tech start-ups are a thing: there are aspects of engineering culture that allow you to envision the future in different ways that kind of run counter to standard business culture, and your job is in that middle line.
Kellan: When the CEO calls, there’s this whole adrenaline experience that you have, because the CEO never calls for a good reason.
Everyone else: [chorus of “no”s]
Kellan: It’s just never a good thing.
Rich: “I just wanted to say I was thinking about you.”
Kellan: Or the email’s like, “Hey….you mind jumping on the phone? I’ve just got a quick phone call.” You’re like, this is never going to end well.
Paul: It’s true — it’s never, “Hey, it’s Thanksgiving, and one of the things I’m thankful for — ”
Rich: The email subject line, “Tried to reach you.”
