Business

alphalist.CTO Podcast - For CTOs and Technical Leaders

Tobias Schlottke - alphalist CTO Podcast

This podcast features interviews of CTOs and other technical leadership figures and topics range from technology to management. Guests from leading tech companies share their best practices...

Episodes

20 of 149 episodes

#149 Governance Gives You Speed: Why AI Agents Must Earn Trust with Sri Viswanath // Founder & CEO @ Sycamore

Sri Viswanath was Atlassian's first ever CTO. He joined right after the IPO and led the move from on-prem to cloud as revenue grew from $500...

64:31Oct 29, 2026

#148 Git Is the Wrong Tool Now: Rewriting the Social Contract of Agentic Teams with Raffi Krikorian // CTO @ Mozilla

Raffi Krikorian has built teams at scale: platform engineering at Twitter, Uber's self-driving center, and the Democratic National Committee...

69:14Oct 15, 2026

#147 "Make It Secure" Isn't a Prompt: A L0pht Hacker on Securing AI-Written Code with Chris Wysopal // Chief Security Evangelist @ Veracode

Chris Wysopal was one of the first hackers to go public. As "Weld Pond" at the L0pht hacker collective in Boston, he testified before the US...

73:10Oct 1, 2026

#146 AI Found What Nine Years of Security Research Missed with Charles Guillemet // CTO @ Ledger

Charles Guillemet has spent nine years building Ledger's security organization from scratch — first as the founder of The Donjon, Ledger's i...

54:24Sep 17, 2026

#145 "Harness Writing Is Not Hard": Build to Learn, Not to Run with David Soria Parra // Member of Technical Staff @ Anthropic

Sponsored by Blocks: Save at least 20% on your AWS costs with AI-powered optimization and enterprise discounts. Get your free Cloud Check at...

77:11Sep 3, 2026

#144 Writing Code Is No Longer the Job: Dana Lawson on Trusting AI Agents Like Self-Driving Cars // CTO @ Netlify

Sponsored by Blocks: Save at least 20% on your AWS costs with AI-powered optimization and enterprise discounts. Get your free Cloud Check at...

59:46Aug 13, 2026

#143 The Company Brain: How Kombo Runs on a Git Repo and a Cursor Agent — with Aike Hillbrands, Co-Founder & CTO @ Kombo

Sponsored by Blocks: Save at least 20% on your AWS costs with AI-powered optimization and enterprise discounts. Get your free Cloud Check at...

57:15Jul 30, 2026

#142 Why LLMs Need Their Own Programming Language: From Assembly to AI with Vaibhav Gupta // Co-founder @ BAML

Sponsored by Blocks: Save at least 20% on your AWS costs with AI-powered optimization and enterprise discounts. Get your free Cloud Check at...

64:54Jul 16, 2026

#141 AI Pat Works Here Now: Why Agents Must Follow Human Rules with Pat Casey // CTO @ ServiceNow

Pat Casey was the first person besides founder Fred Luddy to write code at ServiceNow back in 2005, when it was called Glide and lived above...

66:23Jul 2, 2026

#140 From Stripe's Fifth Engineer to Serving Millions of Developers with Anurag Goel // Founder & CEO @ Render Goel

Before he founded Render, Anurag Goel was the fifth engineer at Stripe, where he watched roughly a fifth of the engineering team disappear i...

72:32Jun 18, 2026

#139 Your Future Job Is a Decision Inbox — Max Deichmann Built the Layer That Gets You There // Co-Founder @ Langfuse

Max Deichmann is the co-founder of Langfuse, the open-source LLM engineering platform that became the observability layer of choice for team...

63:25Jun 4, 2026

#138 From Hacker News to W3C: How One Amazon Engineer Accidentally Shaped the Future of AI Browsers // Alex Nahas, MCP-B

Alex Nahas is 28 years old and has already initiated a W3C web standard. Working as a backend engineer at Amazon, he ran into a problem most...

41:12May 21, 2026

#137 - Only Three Search Engines Left Standing: One of Them Powers Your AI with JP Schmetz // Chief of Ads @ Brave

Most people assume the web runs on Google. The reality is more concentrated: only three companies on earth operate truly independent search...

93:17May 7, 2026

#136 - AI Writes Code: Who Architects the Consequences? with Neal Ford // Software Architect & Author

Neal Ford: software architect, author, speaker, and independent consultant (formerly 20+ years at ThoughtWorks), joins Tobias to explore wha...

56:51Apr 23, 2026

#135 - From Legacy to Innovation: Yahoo's Modernization & AI with Lee Zen // CTO @ Yahoo

Lee Zen, CTO of Yahoo, joins Tobias to unpack what it takes to modernize one of the internet’s most iconic consumer portfolios—Mail, Finance...

37:55Jan 29, 2026

#134 - From Inner to Outer Loop: Agentic Coding, Stacking PRs, and the Cursor Merger with Greg Foster // CTO @ Graphite

Greg Foster, Co-founder and CTO of Graphite (recently acquired by Cursor), joins the podcast to discuss the massive shift occurring in softw...

54:51Jan 15, 2026

#133 - Build the Learning Machine: AI Adoption, Flow Metrics, and the Future of the CTO Role with Eric Bowman

Eric Bowman (CTO @ King.com, previously CTO at TomTom and VP Engineering at Zalando) returns to the alphalist podcast to unpack what “agenti...

57:00Dec 15, 2025

#132 - Clarity Over Tooling: Velocity & Building Teams Without Drama with Loïc Houssier // CTO @ Superhuman Mail

What drives execution velocity—better tools or better clarity? Loïc Houssier, CTO of Superhuman Mail (post-Grammarly acquisition), argues th...

54:11Nov 27, 2025

#131 - AI Product Strategy: When to Build and When to Wait with Matthias Keller // CPO @ Kayak

Matthias Keller, Chief Product Officer at Kayak, shares hard-won lessons about AI product strategy and knowing when to invest in emerging pl...

51:41Nov 13, 2025

#130 - From PhD Research to DuckDB: Building the Next Generation of Analytical DBs with Mark Raasveldt // CTO @ DuckDB

Mark Raasveldt, co-founder and CTO of DuckDB Labs, shares his journey from academic research at CWI Amsterdam to creating one of the most in...

53:12Oct 16, 2025