CTO IS NOT your first hire — Here’s Why
CTO IS NOT your first hire — Here’s Why I’ve seen this mistake far too often. A founder has a big idea and immediately thinks: “Let’s build it, launch it, and people will come.” 🚨 Wrong. Before writing a single line of code, before hiring a CTO, you need to ask: Do people even want […]
Ticketmaster Crashed Because of Legacy Software — How to Start Modernizing Before It’s Too Late”
🎤🚫“Ticketmaster Crashed Because of Legacy Software — How to Start Modernizing Before It’s Too Late” Ticketmaster servers crashed after 3.5 billion hits for Taylor Swift tickets. The Ticketmaster meltdown during the Taylor Swift “Eras Tour” presale wasn’t just bad luck – it was a harsh lesson in failing to modernize old, creaky tech. Here’s how […]
Fire Your Cloud, Not Your Engineers
💭 Fire Your Cloud, Not Your Engineers There was a time when starting a tech company meant: 🖥️ Buying physical servers 🎛️ Running tape backups 🧾 Managing your own Windows domain, Exchange, and printers Fast forward to today: ☁️ We’ve traded it all for cloud convenience—at a massive cost. At one company, we were burning […]
Can ChatGPT Replace Your CTO?
Can ChatGPT Replace Your CTO? Here’s the typical early-stage startup flow: 1. Founder has an idea 2. Raises pre-seed 3. Hires a product manager to spec it out 4. Brings in a CTO or dev agency to build the MVP 5. Launch → test → scale (or pivot) Let’s zoom in on step 4. Traditionally, […]
Better Questions + Better Data = Better Business
Better Questions + Better Data = Better Business Most companies approach data the wrong way. At my data services company, Dive, I see it all the time: 1. Management needs a dashboard, insight, or report. 2. They ask the CTO or lead developer. 3. The developer Googles, hacks together a clunky report… 4. It’s often […]
Why Your Data Stack Costs 10x More Than It Should
Why Your Data Stack Costs 10x More Than It Should One of the most common questions I’m asked almost every week is: Why is Dive different? Let me start by saying: many off-the-shelf analytics tools work great at first. They help teams get quick dashboards, track events, and launch with confidence. But here’s the catch: […]
Over-Engineering Will Kill Your Startup (Microservices)
🚫 Over-Engineering Will Kill Your Startup (Microservices) I keep hearing this line in consulting calls: “We NEED to migrate to microservices.” Here’s the truth: you don’t “need” anything. For non-tech folks: A monolith = one big house where everything is under one roof (simple, fast). Microservices = an apartment building where every unit has its […]
From $100M CTO Exit to a complete failure.
From $100M CTO Exit to a complete failure. Here is what I learned. 🔥 Behind every startup story — win or lose — is a team that gave it everything. After my Playtika exit, I had that team, that dream — and we still failed. This is a story of a company that I tried […]
Thank you so much for the mention.
Thank you so much for the mention. This is an excellent opportunity to announce that Dive is cooking a light version for indie game studios so that more developers can enjoy our experience in data and LiveOps
Excelling post.
Excelling post. It is the CTO’s job ti protect his team from getting pulled to nonsense tasks I have had in my previous company technical developers that werr asked to be team leaders. When you let a talented developer burn his precious time on calls and babysitting instead of writing code then the team and […]