Creating a Better CTO Playbook w/ Dama Financial's CTO Zach Goldberg

**Zach Goldberg** (0:00)
Yes, the business wants you to do it faster and for less.

**Dan Lines** (0:02)
Yeah, do it faster.

**Zach Goldberg** (0:03)
And with half as many people and a tenth the budget.

**Dan Lines** (0:05)
That's the only thing, now, okay, now I know the only truth in engineering. The only truth in engineering is that the business wants you to do it faster. It is kind of true.

**Zach Goldberg** (0:14)
100% agree on that. We can, I'm sure there's a blog posted.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:17)
Have you ever wondered how your dev team ranks in terms of productivity, speed and business impact? With LinearB's new engineering benchmarks report, you can find out.
The product of comprehensively analyzing the work of almost 2,000 dev teams at close to 1 million branches. The 2022 engineering benchmarks report is the first ever look at what performance metrics make engineering orgs elite, average or underperforming. Best of all, if you want your dev team's number to go from average to elite on any of the benchmarks, the report also provides concrete guidance on the behaviors, tools and processes you need to get there. To explore the report in full, visit linearb.io/benchmarks or click the link in the show notes of this episode.

**Dan Lines** (0:59)
Hey, what's up, everyone? Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines. And today I'm joined by Zach Goldberg, CTO at Dama.
Zach, welcome to the show.

**Zach Goldberg** (1:10)
Thanks so much for having me, Dan. I've been looking forward to this.

**Dan Lines** (1:13)
Yeah, awesome to have you here and for our listeners out there. I mean, first off, Zach is one of the smartest people I know, honestly. We get to catch up fairly often. Okay, we're both in LA. You're a customer of LinearB. You're also a friend of mine.
And we had lunch just the other week, which was a great time.

**Zach Goldberg** (1:34)
Yeah, I appreciate you picking up the tab on that.

**Dan Lines** (1:37)
And so, you know, we...
Yeah, yeah, that's the least I can do.
We always have like awesome conversations. You know, they range. I mean, you have a background in entrepreneurship. Obviously, you're a CTO, I think like many times now. CTO founder, CTO, you know, started some companies. So you got a wealth of knowledge. We usually talk like engineering related stuff. Also things on careers and life. And one of the things that I know, you know, about you, and it comes up, you know, often enough, you have this thing around the pursuit of truth. It's also like the kind of the way that you talk about these things. It seems like you have a philosophy on it. I think you've said a few times, there are a few truths in engineering leadership.

**Zach Goldberg** (2:27)
Absolutely.

**Dan Lines** (2:28)
You have a story about this. Can you take me through the journey that kind of allowed you to arrive at that conclusion?

**Zach Goldberg** (2:37)
So it starts actually back in college for me. When I was an undergraduate, I applied to a dual degree program. You know, I was this young overachiever. I wanted to do both business and engineering. Applied to a program that was both, and unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, as it turned out, I wasn't accepted to the dual program, but I was accepted to the engineering portion. So I matriculated and started college as only an engineer, and I still wanted to do business. I was dead set on that. And I was very fortunate. I was assigned an undergraduate advisor who was to help me go through and figure out how to college.
We sat down for coffee. I looked him in the eyes. His name was Max.
And he said to me, I said, you know, let's talk about how do I get into this dual degree program? He looked me dead in the eyes, took a pen out of his pocket protector, because of course, a professor had a pocket protector, took the napkin from under his coffee, drew an XY axis, and drew a line on it, looked me dead in the eyes and said, tell me what you know about special relativity.
And then for the rest of the two hours of that coffee, we didn't talk a word about business. Of course, you know, 19 year old me knew nothing. I still know nothing about special relativity. But the journey that he took me on throughout my undergraduate career was one of focusing on the engineering.
He convinced me that I could spend my time, my four years as an undergraduate, half my foot in business school and half my foot, half my time in engineering, where the really focused on engineering would be the best engineer I could be.