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alphalist.CTO Podcast - For CTOs and Technical Leaders

alphalist.CTO Podcast - For CTOs and Technical Leaders

By: Tobias Schlottke - alphalist CTO Podcast
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About this listen

 This podcast features interviews of CTOs and other technical leadership figures and topics range from technology (AI, blockchain, cyber, DevOps, Web Architecture, etc.) to management (e.g. scaling, structuring teams, mentoring, technical recruiting, product etc.). Guests from leading tech companies share their best practices and knowledge. The goal is to support other CTOs on their journey through tech and engineering, inspire and allow a sneak-peek into other successful companies to understand how they think and act. Get awesome insights into the world‘s top tech companies, personalities with this podcast brought to you by Tobias Schlottke.alphalist Economics Leadership Management Management & Leadership
Episodes
  • #135 - From Legacy to Innovation: Yahoo's Modernization & AI with Lee Zen // CTO @ Yahoo

    #135 - From Legacy to Innovation: Yahoo's Modernization & AI with Lee Zen // CTO @ Yahoo
    Jan 29 2026
    Lee Zen, CTO of Yahoo, joins Tobias to unpack what it takes to modernize one of the internet’s most iconic consumer portfolios—Mail, Finance, Sports, News, and Search—while operating with real legacy constraints at massive scale. We talk about Yahoo’s evolution from its public days to private equity ownership, how modernization actually happens (cloud, platform bets, experimentation), and why shipping velocity becomes the most honest forcing function when you’re rebuilding the engine mid-flight. Finally, we go deep on AI: where it meaningfully improves consumer experiences (mail catch-up, news takeaways, fantasy insights), how teams should avoid “AI labels” without user value, and what it means when AI becomes a tool—and increasingly a coworker.
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    38 mins
  • #134 - From Inner to Outer Loop: Agentic Coding, Stacking PRs, and the Cursor Merger with Greg Foster // CTO @ Graphite

    #134 - From Inner to Outer Loop: Agentic Coding, Stacking PRs, and the Cursor Merger with Greg Foster // CTO @ Graphite
    Jan 15 2026
    Greg Foster, Co-founder and CTO of Graphite (recently acquired by Cursor), joins the podcast to discuss the massive shift occurring in software engineering: the move from maximizing "Inner Loop" speed (writing code) to solving "Outer Loop" bottlenecks (reviewing, testing, merging). With AI generating code faster than humans can review it, the traditional Pull Request model is under pressure. Greg explains how "Stacked PRs" and agentic review workflows are essential for high-performing teams, and why he believes the role of the software engineer is evolving into an "architect of agents." We also cover the strategic rationale behind the Graphite/Cursor merger, the controversial "PRs per engineer" metric, and why he predicts that by 2029, manual code writing will be near zero—but demand for engineers will be higher than ever.
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    55 mins
  • #133 - Build the Learning Machine: AI Adoption, Flow Metrics, and the Future of the CTO Role with Eric Bowman

    #133 - Build the Learning Machine: AI Adoption, Flow Metrics, and the Future of the CTO Role with Eric Bowman
    Dec 15 2025
    Eric Bowman (CTO @ King.com, previously CTO at TomTom and VP Engineering at Zalando) returns to the alphalist podcast to unpack what “agentic engineering” really means in practice—and how to introduce it to teams without turning it into a mandate. We talk about the uncomfortable trade-offs behind “YOLO mode” tooling, why adoption should feel voluntary even when you set explicit goals (like “five AI-assisted commits” as a company-level key result), and why the real opportunity isn’t just faster coding—it’s building a learning system that relentlessly reduces time-to-learning and time-to-value. The conversation spans practical rollout patterns, DORA/value-stream thinking, Toyota’s Andon-cord mindset applied to software, multi-agent decision support with MCP, and why the CTO role may keep converging with product as AI pushes organizations to optimize for iteration speed over output volume.
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    57 mins
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