Five Austin CTOs from the health, e-commerce, education and big data tech sector shared their experiences growing their careers, the challenges they've faced, what technologies power their businesses, the qualities in people they hire, and what they've learned about working in our city.
Alan Ortego on tech's biggest role this year:
"We are focused on interoperability this year. With that goal in mind, we are building out our rest APIs and developing a marketplace for integrations. In addition, we are building out a data warehouse to support the complex needs for healthcare quality reporting. The need for interoperability, plus the demand for analytics, is allowing us to put a lot more focus on the SQL Server BI Stack."
Blake Gardner on biggest tech challenges:
"When we originally hit critical mass, 
we had to scale our legacy server-side applications. It was a big project! We took inspiration from big hitters like Twitter and Facebook, who had first-to-market MVP code bases, and refactored aggressively to optimize and get us over the hump. Once we understood our architecture better, we rewrote our systems with massive scale in mind over first to market."
Alex Victoria on what he looks for in a new hire:
"For me, the biggest thing I look for, and it’s sometimes hard to find, is what we call the finishing spirit. I want finishers. I want people who are willing to power through projects and finish it, and when they tell you it’s done; it’s really done. It’s something people learn with experience. Some people have the finishing gene and some people don’t. It’s not always aligned with how fundamentally smart you are. I’m looking for intelligence, but I’m looking for that spirit of life. Awesome finishers."
Aaron Scruggs described by his team via Slack:
Bryon Jacob on working in Austin:
"Austin's tech community is hyper-connected, way more so than Silicon Valley. This confers a natural advantage to folks with deeper roots in town, but I've also seen a lot of evidence that the networks here are easier to penetrate than in other tech hub cities. There's an explicit drive to support and foster the tech community among the established players. One example is what Josh Baer does with Capital Factory. He has a monthly "ask me anything" meetup where he gives an introduction to the local scene and then fields questions. I've known a number of entrepreneurs who got their introduction to Austin doing just that, and it's helped them build out strong networks. Getting involved at the various incubators, accelerators, and meetup groups in town is something anyone can do and it makes a big difference."
Images via featured companies and Shutterstock.
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