ELC Annual 2023

What’s it like to transition to a ‘Web3’ startup from the ‘Web2’ world? How do you ramp up and become proficient with the new technology? What parts of your engineering leadership experience translate across industries? What types of engineering verticals are in high demand? Join Li Fan (CTO @ Circle) and Sen Xu (VPE & CISO @ OKX) as they demystify the world of engineering leadership in Web3 companies! Li will share her experiences making the transition as an executive leader, how she quickly gained the right domain knowledge, the challenges she faced, and lessons learned about scaling Web3 engineering teams while maintaining agility and innovation!

Generative AI is the "it" productivity tool of the moment, but we're still at the very early stages of incorporating it into everyday workflows. In this session, Shailesh Kumar, SVP of Engineering at ClickUp, and Kelly Ehret, Latitude, will contemplate how engineering teams can take advantage of the "Era of AI" and use it to optimize and accelerate their work. Specifically, Shailesh can share his own experience as an engineering lead at ClickUp, offering anecdotes and advice on how generative AI has helped his team work more collaboratively across departments. He will also share his perspective on encouraging more AI adoption across teams and how to measure success. Listeners will walk away from this session with a tactical understanding of how to motivate engineers to use AI in their day-to-day to achieve meaningful productivity gains.

The choice between building an in-house solution and buying from a third-party never goes away. Engineering bandwidth is precious and there’s no shortage of SaaS options promising easy deployment and big returns. In this panel, experienced leaders get together to talk about how they tackle this challenge. We’ll go beyond the obvious and share how our panelists approach these decisions and reflect on the outcomes.

Leading engineering teams at GitHub in the fast-paced, ever-changing space of AI development while building GitHub Copilot, the first at-scale AI pair programmer used by millions of developers today, requires adaptability, technical expertise, and visionary guidance. In this fireside chat, Scott Densmore will share how GitHub is leading the charge on AI for developers, including how GitHub blends software engineering and data science to bring AI further into all areas of the GitHub Platform and how GitHub Copilot is empowering developers globally to build with AI. You’ll walk away with an understanding of how GitHub builds with AI, how AI can boost productivity amongst your engineering teams, and best practices for how you can introduce AI within your own organization to supercharge engineering teams.

We all want to unlock innovation in our companies, and a powerful way to fuel your company’s innovation engine is by cultivating a “startup within a startup” culture! But how does this work? And how do you operationalize this culture into norms, behaviors, and habits to produce greater innovation? Naveen Kondapalli shares his perspective on staying ahead through a culture of innovation, how to build smaller teams with autonomy, how to spin up multiple products, quickly spin down bets that didn’t work, and validate your hypothesis in areas beyond your expertise. Plus how to navigate the innovator’s dilemma while not losing focus on the core business.

Scaling beyond early market fit presents unique challenges - Where’s the highest leverage? How do you build things that scale & avoid getting stuck with 1000+ MVPs? How do you manage increasing orders of complexity in your teams and product? Where are the greatest opportunities for real vs. perceived velocity? In this session, Marck Robinson, VP of Engineering @ Brex, will unpack strategies for sustaining velocity and efficiency, offering a roadmap to fuel your organization's journey to enterprise scale. Marck shares actionable insights from his experiences operating at massive scale at places like Microsoft Azure, New Relic, and now, Brex.

The GenAI WAVE will dramatically alter organizational structures, your customers, the market, your team's roles and needs, and yours. Waiting to “see how it plays out” is simply not an option for leaders and companies that want to survive it. Why not lead it? Join Andrew Lau (not ChatGPT) as he discusses the evolving roles of engineering as the toolsets change, the changing demands of the engineering function as the industry leverages GenAI, case study on how CoPilot truly impacts an engineering team's productivity, the shifts in leadership requirements and skill sets from hiring to the boardroom, how to use experimentation and empirical data to learn what works for your org and what doesn’t, and why it’s more important than ever to highlight and protect innovation. Transformative technology will continue to change the world, but supporting it with empirical data is essential. And even more importantly, this is all happening right now; if you aren’t paying attention, you must.

In this decade of expensive venture money, Dheeraj emphasizes the value of essentialism - the disciplined pursuit of less - for focused go-to-market strategies. He will share his insights and learnings on fostering customer-centricity across teams and removing information asymmetry between engineering, product, customer support, and sales. AI's potential, including simplifying tasks and leveraging knowledge graphs, empowers engineering teams to align with customer needs, reshaping product development and exceeding customer expectations.