CLONE Summer Startup Series | Engineering Management for Startups

Google Cloud for Startups is pleased to team up with SignalFire to host this summer series focused on Engineering Management for Startups.

Join us along with Jiten Vaidya (PlanetScale/former Googler), Jeff Barrett (former CTO at Stitch Fix) and Guido Appenzeller (Yubico) for a panel talk about their experience with engineering management. This panel will be moderated by Ilya Kirnos (SignalFire).

Food and drinks will be served.

6:00 PM - Doors open. Food and wine served

7:00 PM - Opening & welcome remarks

7:10 PM - Engineering Management Strategies Panel Talk with Q&A

8:00 PM - Closing remarks and small breakout groups

8:30 PM - Event ends

• Insights on how to lead technical teams
• Best practices on how to hire 
• When to bring on local vs. remote developers
• How to define, set, and measure engineering goals and product features 
• Time management and decision making methods for technical leaders

Ilya Kirnos is a Founding Partner and CTO at SignalFire, a complete redesign of the modern venture firm. Prior to co-founding SignalFire in 2013, Ilya was a Software Engineer at Google (2004-2012). During his time at Google, Ilya held several technical leadership positions. He was a Technical Lead for Gmail Ads and was responsible for predicting consumer purchase intent and consumer Gmail monetization. Ilya was also a Technical Lead for AdWords Performance and Scalability where he managed responsiveness and uptime of the AdWords frontend. Prior to this, he performed due diligence on Google’s acquisition of Urchin, which became Google Analytics.

Jiten Vaidya is the co-founder and CEO at PlanetScale. PlanetScale is based in Mountain View, CA and recently raised a $22M series A funding round from Andreessen Horowitz. PlanetScale is building a massively scalable multi-cloud transactional database-as-a-service based on vitess.io - an open source sharding middleware system that runs very large OLTP workloads at companies such as Youtube, Slack and Square. Prior to starting PlanetScale, Jiten held various backend and infrastructure roles at US Digital Service, Dropbox, Youtube and Google. But Fun fact: he has also written an Android app that saw over 100,000 downloads at a small start-up. At Youtube, he managed the teams that operated Youtube’s MySQL databases at massive scale using vitess.io.

Jeff joined Stitch Fix in 2012 when you could count employees on one hand. At the time he was the only person who was over 30, had done their job before, or had leadership experience. There was no product development staff and almost zero technical product. He led product, design, and engineering for the next four years, building large-scale, custom platforms for warehouse operations, shipping logistics, apparel merchandising, a remote styling workforce, consumer web/mobile, and more. When he left in 2016, the company had 4000 employees, was doing $1B in run-rate, had been profitable for 2.5 years, and would go public the following year.

Guido Appenzeller is the Chief Product Officer at Yubico where he focuses on product development and strategy to aid in making strong authentication truly ubiquitous. Guido Appenzeller previously was the CTO Cloud & Networking at VMware where he helped define VMware’s Multi-Cloud Strategy and was part of the team that grew NSX to a $1b product line. Before VMware he co-founded Big Switch Networks and led the company for 4 years as CEO. Previously Guido founded and was CTO at Voltage Security (acquired by HP) and helped grow it to profitability and over 1,000 Enterprise Customers. From 2008 to 2010 Guido was a Consulting Assistant Professor at Stanford University. Guido was named a top Technology Leader on the MIT TR35, a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum and one of the 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs by Goldman Sachs. He holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University and M.S. (Diploma) from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.