The Startup CTO's Handbook | Zach Goldberg

**Zach Goldberg** (0:00)
As a leader, your role is to in a pragmatic way evaluate the trade-offs and understand that regardless of your personal opinion or your team's opinions, what you're looking at now is what's the best fit for my business.
What's going to give us the best performance or the most reliability or the fastest time to market? What's most supported? What has the best documentation? You decide what actually matters for your business and then have that clear-eyed view of let's go and make the right decision for the company, even if it's not my favorite tool.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:37)
Is your engineering team focused on efficiency, but struggling with inaccessible or costly dora metrics? Insights into the health of your engineering team don't have to be complicated or expensive. That's why Linear B is introducing free dora metrics for all. Say goodbye to spreadsheets and manual tracking or paying for your dora metrics.
Linear B is giving away a free, comprehensive dora dashboard packed with essential insights, including all four key dora metrics tailored to your team's data, industry standard benchmarks for gauging performance and setting data-driven goals, plus additional leading metrics including merge frequency and pull request size. Empower your team with the metrics they deserve. Sign up for your free dora dashboard today at linearb.io/dora or follow the link in the show notes.

**Dan Lines** (1:22)
Hey, what's up, everyone? Welcome back to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines, Linear B co-founder and COO.
And today, I'm joined by my guy, Zach Goldberg, CTO, technical executive coach and author of the new book, The Startup CTO's Handbook, Essential skills and best practices for high-performing engineering teams. Zach, great to have you back on DI, man.

**Zach Goldberg** (1:49)
Great to be here again, Dan. Thanks so much for the warm intro.

**Dan Lines** (1:53)
Yeah, I love having you here again. You're doing some really, really exciting stuff. But just as a reminder for people who don't know you from the last time that you're on, you spent a lot of your career as a CTO, working in a bunch of companies, maybe you could say like specializing in startups a bit. You're currently a CTO now, which you can talk a little bit about in a second.
You've written this amazing, amazing book. You're doing technical coaching as well, executive coaching. But I have a little quote here from you. This was in more like pre-production. You said, I always thought it was a stupid idea to write a book. I'm glad I was wrong. Let's start there.
What does that mean? What changed your mind?

**Zach Goldberg** (2:43)
It's a funny world we live in, right? This idea that we still print things on paper and that there's something, with so many ways to consume content, podcasts like this, YouTube videos, email summaries, TLDR is fantastic. There's a million ways to learn, right? And so why in 2023, with special chat cheapie tea, does anybody sit down and just spend an extraordinary effort to write and edit and go through the publishing process of producing an actual book? And that seems sort of silly, but as it turns out, there really is something different in A, the way people consume content when it's a book, whether it's an e-book, an audio book, or a physical book, that the idea that I'm going to dedicate a significant quantity of time to this one subject matter, or this one author, or this one piece of history, whatever the subject, the topic is.
But also from the author's perspective, certainly from my perspective, I've been a CTO for 15, 17 years now, and you develop these thoughts, these opinions on how the world works. And it's not really until you force yourself to sit down and start writing, all right, these best practices that I've been using intuitively, where do they come from? Why do I do things this way? Why does everybody do things this way?
And when you do it from a book, you'd look at it from so many angles and so many different parts of the process, but I do actually think that the sum is greater than the parts.
And the greatest part about it for me has been, the book is open source, if you will. It's available on GitHub for anybody to download for free as either a markdown file or PDF. You can, of course, also buy it on Amazon. But the reception to that has just been phenomenal. There's well over 100,000 downloads on GitHub, 9,000-something stars on the repository. And the feedback has been very positive. People find it useful. And so that's really been just the most satisfying, humbling experience.

**Dan Lines** (4:41)
Let's go through the process. So I don't know if it's true or not. I have a note here that said, because we want to know what inspired you to do so. Is it true that Dev Interrupted, like our pod or our conversations, was part of that inspiration? I'm sure there's many other ones. But where did you get the inspiration for the book?