Welcome, startupers, to the first episode of My CTO Friend the Podcast! In this episode, startup CTO Amaury Khelifi and language coach Mitchie Ruiz introduce this new project and what they’re going to cover throughout the podcast.
Amaury will be sharing his extensive knowledge and experience in successfully building tech startups, so if you’re a founder without a technical background, listen up because you’re in the right place.
Transcript
Mitchie Ruiz: Welcome to My CTO Friend the Podcast, where founders come to learn how to manage a tech startup. This is Mitchie Ruiz, and I’m with Amaury Khelifi.
Amaury Khelifi: Hi Mitchie, and welcome startupers to the first episode of My CTO Friend: The Podcast. Today we are introducing you to this [new] project and what we are going to cover.
Mitchie: That’s right. Throughout this series of episodes, Amaury is going to share his knowledge and extensive experience in building tech startups. So if you’re a founder without a technical background, listen up because you’re in the right place.
Amaury: I think you might be wondering why and what this podcast is all about. This podcast is for startup founders, mainly without a technical background. Anyone around startups like incubators, aspiring entrepreneurs and startupers. Anyone who has a good idea in mind and wondering what to do next.
Mitchie: Now I want to just go ahead and ask you Amaury, why did we actually decide to launch this podcast. How did this came about?
Amaury: Well, it’s because it’s been five years since I started mentoring and working as a CTO for many startups, more than 110 startups to be exact. And I’ve seen everything. You know, nine out of 10 startups fail. That’s just the statistics. And only one mobile application [out of] 10,000 will be financially successful. And that’s not me that says that, it’s the Gartner analysis. So that’s why I launched my [My CTO Friend] YouTube Channel in 2016, to teach tech management to founders. Because I want them to succeed and to [get] the support, the technical management backup they really need.
Mitchie: Right now we’re going through the process of actually writing a book. I’m helping Amaury write a book. I’m his ghostwriter. And through this process of interviews, we actually realized that this would be a great way to do a podcast. We’re preparing for the book, and we’re just recording ourselves doing parts of the interview process so that people out there could actually learn from it. We’ve been working already for two years. A very successful collaboration, if I may say so myself.
Amaury: Absolutely.
Mitchie: So now we’re just doing this project together to make sure that the CEO’s time is optimized, and they can actually learn on the go.
Amaury: Because that’s something that founders have lots of difficulties with—they always lack the time. And myself, actually, I have so many things to do that I found that the podcast format is so amazing. I’ve listened to thousands and thousands of hours of podcasts and learned on the go through this way, and today I want you to learn the same way to manage tech startups successfully.
Mitchie: Yeah, I have to agree. I am a big fan of learning, and for me, podcasts are a great source of material. Right now we’re just trying to do quality content to put out there and make sure you can learn—you listeners can actually learn about startup tech management. Amaury has a lot of experience. And throughout my work with him, I’ve seen him actually just spew out so much information. So I really hope that you will learn as much as I have in the time I’ve worked with him.
Amaury: So what do you think you’re going to learn in this podcast? I have basically four areas that I want to share with you, not only in this episode but also in all the following ones. The first is the IT management, especially in the startup context—how to manage technical developers, agencies, etcetera. The second one is a bit of tech expertise. And by “tech expertise,” of course, this podcast is not for those with technical background, but we are just going to explain, in the simplest manner as possible, how things work, which type of technologies for which type of projects.
There is a third role when we launch a startup that’s often a role that the CTO is taking on, and this is the product-owner role. The product owner, it’s a product-manager role. It’s about being able to structure a project, prioritizing features depending on the cost, depending on the cost, depending on the customers’ expectations, as well as on the founder’s beliefs and the founder’s vision of the product.
And the final point that we will cover for a bit is the innovative way of doing things—how we can innovate in our project, how we can bring in more ideas. Because sharing ideas or analyzing other projects brings new ideas, and we hopefully want to help you come up with new ideas to make your project more innovative.
Mitchie: That’s right. And we have different formats in which we’re going to carry out this podcast and the different episodes. First, we’re just going to do an informal interview process throughout the process of writing Amaury’s book like I mentioned. We’re just going to cover several topics that Amaury’s going to publish on his Startup Without a CTO book, and after 20 episodes or so, we’re going to switch to an interview mode.
So the idea would be to focus on startup founders that are going through different tech management challenges, or that have gone through tech management challenges, and what we can learn from their successes and failures. Then from time to time, we’re going to dive into deep topics, be it the different roles that Amaury just mentioned—the product owner, innovation, tech expertise and IT management. There are different tasks and different, let’s say, topics that are related to…
Amaury: Challenges.
Mitchie: Yeah, different challenges, different obstacles that might be related to these roles. So from time to time, we’re going to go through different topics, different challenges. We’re going to dive deeply into it, and Amaury’s going to share all of his knowledge and his expertise, and advice, to go through this. It’s going to be fun.
Amaury: Yeah, we’re going to have a lot of good time. And I look forward to have all your feedback as well as your expectations. If you have any topic [suggestions], feel free to share it. We have a dedicated page on myctofriend.co/podcast. You can contact us over there, put your questions, as well as find all the episodes that we publish.
Mitchie: That’s right, that’s right.
Amaury: Thank you for listening in this episode with us. You can get all the notes and the transcription of this episode on myctofriend.co/1, and I’m looking forward to recording the next one and having all your feedback.
Mitchie: That’s right. On the next episode, we’re going to cover a little bit who we are and what our roles are going to be during this podcast. And look forward to our next episodes! I hope you’re listening and I hope to hear from you soon.
Amaury: Bye-bye. Thank you, Mitchie. Bye.
Mitchie: Bye, Amaury.
