Etienne de Bruin is Founder of 7CTOs and Author of CTO Excellence in 100 Days.
Victoria talks to Etienne about his book, founding 7CTOs, and keeping your technology sustainable by inspiring and motivating technology teams and people to work together and build complex systems.
CTO Excellence in 100 Days (https://www.amazon.com/CTO-Excellence-100-Days-Becoming-ebook/dp/B0BV8P7K3S/ref=sr_1_1?crid=14TM3PTHA16UA&keywords=cto+excellence+in+100+days&qid=1680643461&sprefix=CTO+Excellence+in+100+Days%2Caps%2C110&sr=8-1)
7CTOs (https://7ctos.com/)
Follow 7CTOs on Twitter (https://twitter.com/7ctos), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/7ctos/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/7CTOs) or YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/c/7ctos).
Follow Etienne de Bruin on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/etdebruin/) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/etdebruin).
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Transcript:
VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Etienne de Bruin, Founder of 7CTOs and Author of CTO Excellence in 100 Days. Etienne, thank you for joining me.
ETIENNE: My pleasure, Victoria. Thanks for having me.
VICTORIA: You're welcome. I'm excited to talk with you today. I hear that you recently published your book. Is it today actually the day it came out?
ETIENNE: Today is the day. The book was finished about; I would say, three months ago. So I have had great anticipation now for many, many months. And you caught me on the day, so I feel like today is my birthday.
VICTORIA: [laughs] Well, I feel honored that you chose us as your first stop [laughs] in your marketing push for your book. So tell me, what in your experience led you to begin writing this?
ETIENNE: Well, as you mentioned, I founded 7CTOs. I think it's about ten years ago now. I myself am a CTO type. I've had a career of basically being born to code in South Africa, which took me to Stellenbosch University in South Africa. I then joined a startup that took me to Germany and then landed in the U.S. in San Diego. And my whole journey has been a progression from individual contributor and really having great coding skills through the messiness and the intricacies of building startups, contributing to startups, and ultimately being in the role of CTO in startups.
And what led me to founding 7CTOs was just a realization that I didn't have the support I needed. I felt like I was going to many meetups, which was mostly oriented towards coding and sort of different new technology stacks and frameworks, or I was going to cocktail hours with vendors who were trying to sell you something. And I really felt the need to just be with my people so that I could, in a safe, and consistent, and accountable way, share the challenges that I was experiencing.
It was really from this place of founding 7CTOs, talking to hundreds of...I've probably spoken to thousands of CTOs by now. I've also placed people. I've connected people. I've seen people join companies because of connections I've made. And one of the things I saw that really bothered me was finding a great company in search of a CTO reaching out to me, talking to me about the role, me finding or through my network connecting them with a great CTO, only to find that a few months later either the relationship fizzles or even worse, the person did not succeed at the new company.
And I just felt like you can have two people, a great founder, and great CTO, individually wonderful people, ostensibly well-suited to work with each other, but then make some basic mistakes that then lead towards not the desired outcome. And so I was really torn whether I should put some thoughts into a book or into some blog posts about what I think the first 100 d