Former Uber CTO Thuan Pham on 'Violent' Growth

09/28/20 • 42 min

In our very first episode, we’re talking to Thuan Pham, the former CTO of Uber.

Thuan is the longest-serving executive at Uber. He started there in 2013, when ride-sharing was in just a couple-dozen cities. He left in May of this year, when Uber is in more than 900 cities and booking billions of rides per quarter.

Thuan will tell some harrowing tales about keeping Uber’s systems running as the popularity of ride sharing exploded.

"Hyper growth and exponential stuff seems fun to talk about when you look at the numbers and the graph, the hockey sticks and stuff like that, but when you have to live it and actually make it happen, it's excruciatingly painful," says Thuan.

Quentin Clark and Steve Herrod spoke with Thuan about how he kept the technical structure of the organization intact as the company ballooned -- starting with the moment he arrived.

In our very first episode, we’re talking to Thuan Pham, the former CTO of Uber.

Thuan will tell some harrowing tales about keeping Uber’s systems running as the popularity of ride sharing exploded.

Quentin Clark and Steve Herrod spoke with Thuan about how he kept the technical structure of the organization intact as the company ballooned -- starting with the moment he arrived.

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Join Former Dropbox CTO Quentin Clark and Former VMWare CTO Steve Herrod as we go deep with the people making tech work at the most successful and cutting-edge companies -- to learn what they do, how they solve problems, and how they build and lead engineering teams.

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Slack CPO Tamar Yehoshua on Humanizing Software

In this episode, we're speaking with Tamar Yehoshua, the Chief Product Officer at Slack.

We’re talking about designing products for the future of work, today.

The pandemic injected a lot of urgency at Slack, which saw user growth explode after millions of people suddenly started working from home. We’re still sorting through how this mass-remote work culture will impact workplace collaboration -- and Tamar’s team is thinking deeply about how to better serve this new world in a human way.

"A lot of what I think about when developing software is how do you understand the emotional state of your user and being able to speak to that? How do you make sure your user, whoever's using your product feels good, doesn't make them feel stupid. We like to say that at Slack don't make your users feel stupid," says Tamar.

Tamar has been the CPO of Slack since early 2019. Before that, she was a VP at Google with product and engineering roles across search and privacy. She was also a VP at Amazon’s search engine ad company, A9.

Steve Herrod and Quentin Clark speak with Tamar about how she’s creating products, managing teams, and learning new things about Slack in this drastically different work environment.