The First 100 Days of Code: What to Build, What to Buy, and What to Borrow

From Founding Engineer to CTO to CEO – At the Same Startup

Monday Nov 17 / 10:35AM PST

As a college sophomore, I founded Pointz, initially building its core routing engine from scratch. I architected the platform’s safety rating algorithm, integrating geospatial data structures, crowdsourced inputs, and multi-criteria decision-making to deliver context-aware routing.

Trisha Ballakur

Co-Founder and CEO @Pointz, Forbes 30 Under 30 2025, Previously @Techstars and @Adobe

From Staff Platform Engineer to a 16z Founder: What I Wish I'd Known

Monday Nov 17 / 11:45AM PST

The Technical Leadership Challenge: Every successful engineering team faces the same inflection point: transforming beloved internal tools into a legitimate platform business.

Gonzalo (Glo) Maldonado

CTO & Cofounder of @Mocksi.ai, Staff Platform Engineer Turned Startup Founder, Turns Developer Platforms into Products, Temporal & MCP Fanatic

Maximizing Success with Limited Time, Resources, and Energy: Lessons from Startup Engineering

Monday Nov 17 / 02:45PM PST

Startups are the harshest environments for engineers. Limited time, resources, and energy force teams to make decisions under pressure — and those decisions can determine whether a company survives or stalls.

David Gudeman

Co-Founder and CTO @Velocity AI

The Future of Engineering: Mindsets That Matter When Code Isn’t Enough

Monday Nov 17 / 03:55PM PST

Since the first compiler, software has been a stack of human-friendly abstractions translated into machine instructions. The engineers who understood at least some of what was going on under the hood were essential—indispensable even. But now?

Ben Greene

4X Founding CTO, Co-Founder and CTO @Tessi, Co-Creator of FreeFormula.Exchange, CTO-in-Residence at Techstars Boston

Unconference: Early Stage Startups

Monday Nov 17 / 01:35PM PST