We deconstruct two distinct career paths in engineering & leadership, and a co-founder relationship 15 years in the making. In part 2, Tom & Viraj share why they decided to start a company together, how they assess start-up opportunities, early company building & values-defining conversations, and other strong opinions on how they’re creating the engineering culture and execution at Common Room. VIRAJ MODY, CO-FOUNDER & CTO @ COMMON ROOMViraj led engineering organizations at Convoy and Dropbox, helping both companies scale their teams and products. Viraj was also a founding engineer at Audiogalaxy, where he worked alongside Tom, which was acquired by Dropbox. TOM KLEINPETER, CO-FOUNDER & CHIEF ARCHITECT @ COMMON ROOMTom was a Principal Engineer at Dropbox, and before that the CTO at Audiogalaxy and FolderShare, startups which sold to Dropbox and Microsoft, respectively. He’s also the co-host of The Downtime Project - https://downtimeproject.com/ a podcast that helps engineers learn from the Internet’s most notable outages. SHOWNOTESTom’s career path - from engineering leader to principal engineer (4:07)Viraj’s career path to become an engineering leader (8:54)How to reduce mental overhead by connecting with your team and leveraging candor & authenticity (14:27)How to shape the culture and execution of an engineering org at a new company (17:46)Early company building & values-defining conversations (22:33)How they decided to start a company together & Tom’s framework to assess joining a startup (28:27)Tom & Viraj’s strong opinions on building engineering organizations and culture (34:34)What Tom & Viraj admire most about working with each other (40:33)Takeaways (43:01) Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at https://sfelc.com/