Introducing "Selling to CTOs"

What is this?

A free weekly newsletter with advice and information on accelerating executive engagement with, and adoption of your developer, platform or data tool(s). 

Whether you’re a generalist (founder/CEO/COO/CMO) or a specialist focusing on product marketing, brand/content marketing, demand gen or field/events marketing, I’ll be sharing the tips I’ve learned over the last 15 years while connecting senior engineering leaders with the startups that could improve the effectiveness of their orgs.

As an ex-CTO, a Chief of Staff to a CTO wrangling 400 engineers and a member of most of the engineering leadership communities out there, I have a unique perspective on how to engage with senior data and engineering leaders to drive interest, engagement and adoption of developer/platform/data tools.

Who is it for?

Founders, marketing and revenue executives at [developer|platform|data] tool companies that have (or want to have) an executive/enterprise sales motion. 

Who am I?

Hi! I’m Peter Bell. I host the O’Reilly CTO Hour, facilitate the executive summit at KubeCon for CNCF and have been organizing and running CTO communities and events for over fifteen years.

Why am I doing this?

For the last decade I’ve helped companies like AWS, DataDog, Chronosphere, CircleCI, CloudBees, LaunchDarkly, Astronomer, Monte Carlo and Snowflake to connect with senior engineering leaders to drive enterprise sales through my CTO and Chief Data Officer events.

I often find that there’s a disconnect between the partners I work with and the senior engineering leaders they’re trying to influence. They have awesome products that would transform the effectiveness of the engineering orgs, but they’re not always able to convey that in a way the executives can consume.

This is my attempt to bridge that gap so we can help engineering leaders to understand, engage with and adopt the technologies that could accelerate their organizations.

Why am I doing this?

I’m too old and lazy to raise venture again, but I still want to have a positive impact on the world 🙂 

If software is eating the world, software executives are an efficient fulcrum for maximizing impact while minimizing effort (see old and lazy above).

If I can influence the CTOs, CIOs, CISOs and CDOs who are running the teams who are building the software that’s eating the world, I can have an outsized impact with a podunk little business, so I’ll still have time for martial arts, meditation, music, hacking and my family. 

My passion is building communities for engineering leaders - starting when I co-organized the NY CTO School back in 2010 with Jean Barmash, Kurt Schrader and Liz Crawford (instigated by the tireless and amazing Charlie O’Donnell).

I realized by 2014 that if I wanted to create a the maximum value for the community, I’d have to make enough money from it to do it full time. And with that insights, the CTO Summits were born.

By November of 2019 I was a Senior Director at Flatiron School/WeWork, running annual CTO Summits in SF and NYC and when I got caught up in a RIF after the failed WeWork IPO, I thought it’d be a perfect time to double down on an in-person conference business.

Two monthly later I learned that my vision was better than my timing (thank you COVID), but I pivoted to an online first model and created a modest seven figure business connecting senior engineering leaders with each other and with the companies that wanted to engage with them.

By 2022, online started to atrophy. Attendance dropped 80% in a quarter as people decided they had better things to do than join yet another zoom call every week or two. I scrapped all of the meetups and doubled down on the return to in-person events.

By the fall of 2023, I had the perfect model. Exclusive, free, invite only conferences in NY and SF for engineering, data and platform leaders. Carefully structured to blend engaging speakers with breakout conversations and carefully crafted to allow for organic relationships between both the engineering leaders and the partners covering the costs of the events.

Turns out that the fall of 2023 was not the ideal time to get venture backed startups to find money to sponsor events. We were in the middle of a venture winter, and unfortunately I had to shutter CTO Connection in November of 2023, walking away with lots of good memories and ~$600k in personal debts.

In 2024, I had the good fortune to join Engineer Access and got to build monthly meetups in NYC for CTOs at Scale, Startup CTOs and DirectorPlus audiences. In the fall of 2024 I got the chance to join a large AdTech company as Chief of Staff to the CTO to get first hand experience wrangling a global engineering team of ~400 people. Any now I’m excited to be relaunching a series of niche communities for senior engineering leaders - online and in person.

I’m also excited to help [dev|data|platform] tool companies to build or refine their executive motions and to connect in-person and online with senior engineering leaders. If you’d like to learn more, feel free to drop me a line!