Parallel Engineering Paths, Culture Building & Co-Founding (part 2) with Viraj Mody & Tom Kleinpeter #35
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We deconstruct two distinct career paths in engineering & leadership, and a co-founder relationship 15 years in the making. In part 2, Tom & Viraj share why they decided to start a company together, how they assess start-up opportunities, early company building & values-defining conversations, and other strong opinions on how they’re creating the engineering culture and execution at Common Room.

VIRAJ MODY, CO-FOUNDER & CTO @ COMMON ROOM

Viraj led engineering organizations at Convoy and Dropbox, helping both companies scale their teams and products. Viraj was also a founding engineer at Audiogalaxy, where he worked alongside Tom, which was acquired by Dropbox.

TOM KLEINPETER, CO-FOUNDER & CHIEF ARCHITECT @ COMMON ROOM

Tom was a Principal Engineer at Dropbox, and before that the CTO at Audiogalaxy and FolderShare, startups which sold to Dropbox and Microsoft, respectively. He’s also the co-host of The Downtime Project) - https://downtimeproject.com/) a podcast that helps engineers learn from the Internet’s most notable outages.

SHOWNOTES

• Tom’s career path - from engineering leader to principal engineer (4:07)
• Viraj’s career path to become an engineering leader (8:54)
• How to reduce mental overhead by connecting with your team and leveraging candor & authenticity (14:27)
• How to shape the culture and execution of an engineering org at a new company (17:46)
• Early company building & values-defining conversations (22:33)
• How they decided to start a company together & Tom’s framework to assess joining a startup (28:27)
• Tom & Viraj’s strong opinions on building engineering organizations and culture (34:34)
• What Tom & Viraj admire most about working with each other (40:33)
• Takeaways (43:01)

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