Engineering Growth Can Surprise You by Bill Coughran, David Singleton
Early companies often recruit a core team that builds an MVP product and finds that mythical “product / market fit”. Then growth and, if you're lucky, more growth sets in with a new set of challenges and surprises. How much time should everyone in the engineering organization spend on recruiting? Your original core developers built all of the key components but how do you hand it off to new people joining? Is there a role for managers or will you end up with a traditional military hierarchy? What about product management? What about technical debt? As organizations grow, how much time goes to communication and meetings? … Bill will speak from his experience as a founder, from Google, and with many of the Sequoia companies he's worked with.
Bill Coughran
Bill Coughran works as a founders' coach and partner at Sequoia Capital to help build spectacular technology-centric companies. Previously, Bill was Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google with oversight of Chrome, YouTube, maps, google.com, underlying infrastructure systems, and security.
David Singleton
David Singleton is chief technology officer at Stripe, where he is responsible for guiding its engineering and design teams as they build economic infrastructure for the internet. Since joining Stripe, David has helped grow the technology org across the US and developed new engineering hubs in Singapore and Dublin as well as Stripe’s fifth hub - remote engineering - across the globe. David joined Stripe after an 11-year career at Google where he was VP of Engineering leading product development and coordinating more than 15 different hardware partnerships. Prior to Google, David spent three years at Symbian, the pioneering mobile phone operating system, developing operating system software and leading handset development projects for Nokia and Samsung smartphones. David has a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from St. John’s College at the University of Cambridge. In his spare time, he enjoys cooking, skiing, and tinkering with neural networks. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and two kids.
