Episode 51: Peter Wang- Being a CTO

The One Percent Project- Entrepreneurship, Leadership & Resilience

About Peter Wang:

"Program maintenance is an entropy-increasing process, and even its most skillful execution only delays the subsidence of the system into unfixable obsolescence." — Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, 1975. Simple put, all it means is once you build software and keep making changes to it. Its quality will degrade and eventually degrade to a point where it becomes unusable.

Today on The One Percent Project, I am speaking to Peter Wang. Peter is the Chief Technology Officer at Buzzfeed, overseeing Product Management, Engineering, Design, and Data teams across all portfolio brands. Peter has built both consumer and enterprise products and fundraised from a diverse range of investors across industries—health (The Mighty, backed by GGVC, Upfront, and WPP Health), SaaS (Buddy Media, backed by Greylock, acquired by Salesforce), media & e-commerce (Refinery29, backed by Stripes, WPP, Scripps).

Peter, in this conversation, talks about his journey as a CTO, leadership vs management, and his delegation mechanism, which Keith Rabois outlined in his essay How to be an effective executive and what has been learnt as an angel investor.
Some Key Highlights:

• Buddy Media was acquired by Salesforce. I remember being there after it was acquired by Salesforce. And I realized that what we have built wasn't particularly the most technologically robust advanced futuristic version of it. but it was a combination of the right set of capabilities slash features that the clients need combined with the right marketing.
• Emotion has so much more decision-making power than we even understand.
• Culture is based on identity. Culture is based on values. Culture is embedded into our decision-making, even though we cannot articulate or quantify it when we talk to people.

In this conversation, she talks about:
00:00 Intro
02:13 How does one know the role they play beyond their title?
04:56 Leadership Vs Management is there a difference?
06:30 As a CTO, how do you build an intelligent and practical system without being too futuristic?
10:32 Delegation: Your views?
13:56 Is there a difference between a CTO and a VP of engineering?
17:24 90-day plan, when you kick start in a new role. The 3 Ps- Double-click on that.
21:42 Is technology the secret sauce of Buzz Feed's success?
24:58 What can data not do?
29:38 What have you learnt as an angel investor?

Links:

• The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
• Keith Rabois Essay 3: How to be an Effective Executive