On the lighter side of things , we ask the industry experts what makes them tick . . . .

It just really happened on the fly . I started my career as a machine learning engineer or data scientist , whatever title you prefer . I was supposed to implement AI into products and was working with other data scientists . I saw a lot of bad practices from data scientists ; bad stuff in terms of coding style and also coding security . And I was pushed to thinking “ okay , how can I help my fellow data scientists and software engineers write more secure code ?”

GitGuardian started as a side project just to see how I could use the largest publicly available training database for code , which is GitHub , to try to find vulnerabilities in code . I started with scanning for secrets and it went from there .

What has been your favorite challenge of growing a startup ?

I will say learning to scale , which for me was also learning to help people learn . As you scale with a lot of people , you still need to help them ramp up , teach them how the company works , our values , how our product works , how we sell our product , our marketing message and really try to scale the learning experience . As we ’ ve grown , I ’ ve gotten further from the process , but still , my favorite part is helping people to learn and get better .

How has your role changed in the growth from 20 to 120 employees ?

Early , as co-founder and CTO , the C in the title doesn ’ t mean much . You ’ re pushing code , you ’ re the product person , you ’ re the sales engineer , you ’ re doing design , a lot of individual contributor work .

I loved writing code and there ’ s a point in the journey where , as a technical leader , you stop writing code . That took me a few years . It is a tough experience , and many CTOs never succeed at stepping away from that . The farther removed they get from the day-to-day of the engineering teams , the more they can get out of sync with the teams ’ coding standards and practices . Luckily for my technical teams , I recognized that and stepped back .

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