Technology leadership after the AI turn.
Modern CTO is a technology leadership conversation show centered on CTOs, founders, authors, and engineering operators. Recent episodes move from AI code review and agentic automation to WordPress VIP, NVIDIA, Shazam, Braze, Flowable, and the practical strain of scaling software organizations.
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Modern CTO is a conversation-driven technology show built around the people making, managing, and explaining modern software systems. Its recent episodes spend a lot of time on AI, but not only as a headline. AI appears as code review pressure, agentic software work, artificial creativity, automation inside businesses, and a possible bubble shaped by infrastructure, ethics, and cost. The show is especially interested in what remains human when more code, coordination, and analysis can be handed to tools. That question comes up through Macroscope, Braze, WordPress VIP, Flowable, and discussions of engineering management. The conversations tend to begin plainly: what the company does, what the guest's role is, and what problem sits underneath the episode title. From there, the show moves into systems. Sometimes those systems are technical, such as high-scale messaging, enterprise publishing, software dashboards, or autonomous agents. Sometimes they are organizational, such as reputation, management, product ownership, founder transitions, and the work of keeping teams aligned. The range is broader than software process alone. Recent titles and excerpts also touch NVIDIA, The Thinking Machine, Shazam's early mobile history, consumer robots, data centers, healthcare technology, and the privacy cost of machines inside the home. The pace is informal and candid. Technical concepts sit beside personal anecdotes, business judgment, and blunt questions about what actually works. The show does not read like a polished lecture series. It feels closer to an operator's conversation where a product demo, a management lesson, and an AI risk argument can sit in the same hour. That looseness is part of the value. Modern CTO gives a listener a cross-section of how executives and builders are talking about AI and software right now: hopeful, skeptical in places, practical about constraints, and often focused on the gap between working code and a working company.
Made for: Suits a listener who follows CTOs, founders, engineers, and product-minded operators wrestling with AI, automation, and software organizations. It also fits someone who likes company-building stories alongside practical technical leadership talk.
What sets it apart: The show pairs current AI-software questions with named company contexts, so abstract trends are repeatedly tied back to Braze, Macroscope, WordPress VIP, Flowable, NVIDIA, and Shazam. Its edge is the mix of executive conversation, product judgment, and casual operator detail.
Modern CTO is the #1 place where technology leaders and CTOs hang out. We live to bring tech leaders value. Listen in on our fun, intelligent and engaging podcast. We hang out with interesting and popular CTOs in Aerospace, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics + Many more industries. All of this, right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast. What do you think of the show? Let us know here!
The code is merged, the feature switch is off, and you still have a launch to explain.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded engineering-management episode about scale, systems, and the judgment leaders build over time.
Modern CTO uses the question of AI and code review to open a wider discussion about engineering management. Francisco Trindade, Vice President of Software Engineering at Braze, frames management as a discipline that keeps changing as teams and companies grow.
A grounded Modern CTO episode on AI-built software and the human work still holding releases together.
Modern CTO looks at what software teams still need once AI can write more of the code. Kayvon Baikpour, co-founder and CEO of Macroscope, frames his product as a command and control center for software development: something that reads the code base, uses LLMs to explain what is…
A CTO's tour from enterprise WordPress to AI systems that begin to look like creative teams.
Brian Alvey, CTO of WordPress VIP, gives the conversation a grounded entry point, explaining how WordPress VIP sits apart from global or consumer WordPress and serves high-profile sites that require uptime, security, traffic handling, and DDoS resilience.
Brian Singer connects AI speculation to healthcare technology, self-prompting systems, ethics, hardware costs, and data center resistance.
Modern CTO frames AI's real bubble less as overinvestment in a shiny tool than as the distance between speculative enthusiasm and technology partnerships that actually help organizations move faster.
A grounded AI conversation that weighs promise against privacy, price, and the chores people would gladly hand off.
Zach Kass brings a grounded tension to this single-episode review of AI and human potential. His book, The Next Renaissance, AI and the Expansion of Human Potential, began as a way to organize his own thinking, then took on a more personal shape after his daughter was born.
Specialists walking through software's tradeoffs, one system at a time.
Founders and engineers on AI coding agents like Claude Code, and supply chain security.
Chris Barton, founder of Shazam, discusses the company's journey from a phone-based service to a $400 million acquisition by Apple.
Wade Foster, co-founder and CEO of Zapier, shares the origin story of Zapier and discusses how top companies are scaling AI within their organizations.
Stephen Witt discusses his book 'The Thinking Machine' about NVIDIA and its CEO Jensen Huang, including how he secured interviews with Huang.
Micha Kiener, CTO at Flowable, discusses his transition from CEO to CTO and the evolution of business automation with agentic technologies.
Denise Hemke, CPO at NeoGov, discusses how her company provides HCM and public safety software built specifically for the public sector, emphasizing compliance and fairness over speed.
["Modern CTO speaks with Francisco Trindade, Vice President of Software Engineering at Braze, about whether AI can move humans out of code review and how engineering leaders should think in systems.", "Joel Beasley hosts Trindade, who says he is usually based in New York but is in S\u00e3o Paulo this week for a conference where he is speaking about his book and leadership work.", "Trindade says code review has become the bottleneck as AI tools improved over the past year, and he breaks the shift into \"V0\" and \"V1\" stages.", "He points to Braze sending billions of messages a day, Span tracking PR review speed and engineering investment, and a college software company that spent three months on diagrams before writing any code."]
["Kayvon Beykpour tells Modern CTO's Joel Beasley that Macroscope is a command and control center for software development, built to turn code changes into status updates executives can read.", "He says the product also does automated code review and uses an agent that watches GCP logs overnight, clusters severe issues, investigates them, and posts PRs.", "Beykpour argues that the bottleneck has moved from code generation to code review, and says AI reviewers are already better than humans at finding bugs while humans stay stronger on architecture.", "The conversation tests that argument against browser-based usability checks, documentation updates, feature-switch timing, and examples from Twitter, Periscope, Grok, Gemini, Retool, and Block."]
["Brian Alvey, CTO of WordPress VIP, says AI is closer to \"artificial creativity\" than artificial intelligence and argues that writing was the first work it changed.", "He places WordPress VIP inside Automatic and says it serves sites like the White House, NASA, Salesforce.com, The New York Post, Rolling Stone, The Onion, and Savannah Bananas.", "He uses sandwich-making, dot-matrix printers, and \"shortcuts\" to argue that decades of digitized work made AI's jump into browsers and laptops possible.", "He ends by saying a modern CTO can do more with smaller teams, citing a six-year app that he says was rebuilt in four days in Tokyo."]
["On Modern CTO, Joel Beasley talks with Brian Singer, CTO at RSI and owner and president of The Singer Concept, about the AI bubble he sees in healthcare.
Modern CTO's Joel Beasley talks with Zach Kass, the former OpenAI go-to-market lead, about The Next Renaissance, which launched on January 13.
Alan Williamson, author of Think Like a CTO, says five times out of ten a CTO is simply the most senior developer.
Guy Kawasaki says Signal retains three data points—phone number, account opening, and last use—while he says Meta and Apple retain about 12 metadata items.