Growth Through Transitions
Summary
At the beginning of 2020 Discord was a small SF-based startup with millions of users and a small team of engineers. Prachi was just hired as head of engineering…and then the world changed.
Today, Discord is a hybrid company with 150 million users and hundreds of engineers distributed across the U.S. In this session, Prachi will take us through her journey of evolving a beloved product during the pandemic, expanding her family, and growing the team, while still remaining agile and focused on building belonging and community. She will share strategies on execution, lessons learned through startup trials, and how to give away your Legos.
Speakers
Prachi Gupta heads engineering at Discord. With close to two decades of experience in consumer technology companies, she is responsible for leading the strategy and execution of a highly scalable and distributed technology stack that powers millions of conversations. Prachi enjoys building engineering teams and defining culture and processes that enable teams to grow and succeed in a repeatable and predictable manner. As an entrepreneurial engineer at heart, she enjoys prototyping ideas and conceptualizing, designing, and delivering impactful software. Prachi is an active supporter of diversity in STEM, co-founded LinkedIn's Women in Technology initiative, and is an alumnus board member of Women's Audio Mission.
Prachi holds a Master's in Computer Science and has significant experience in working with startups to explore innovative solutions to real-world problems, from socially-driven consumer websites to enterprise business intelligence & analytics software.
Chris Chiu is a Director of Engineering at Figma. Figma is a web-based design tool, and Chris’s teams work on Collaboration & Community as well as Figma’s mobile, tablet, and desktop platforms. Before Figma, Chris led product engineering and platform teams at Flexport and OpenGov.
Chris was born in Brazil and has lived in the Bay Area for 14 years. He loves e-bike rides with his kids and reading fantasy & sci-fi novels.
