The Technical Founder

During your tech career, at some point you're likely to want to try a startup. As a Technologist, you'll have lots of opportunities and the thrill and potential rewards are great. But while there's a lot of information around "Startups" in general, there can be an amazing lack of discussion around what it means to be a technical founder or co-founder. In this session, I'll go over some of the things I've witnessed myself as one of Microsoft's Startup Evangelists and a Startup Technical Founder and Co-Founder myself. Bring questions and your own observations, I'll make sure there will be plenty of time for Q&A as well.

• Phil Wheat

  4 Recordings

  Experienced Technologist with cross training in executive coaching, marketing, logistics, financials, and startup survival. My technology background reaches back to the pre-windows era, though I’ve worked with every version of that OS. I've worked with Software systems ranging from pure cloud, to embedded processors and all things in between. I’m comfortable with Mhz clock cycles as well as Ghz. I currently have production code running that was written in C, C++, COBOL, FORTRAN, Pascal, BASIC (Quick and otherwise,) Delphi, C#, VB.Net, JavaScript, Java, Smalltalk, Gemstone, T-SQL, and probably a dozen other languages I no longer remember. My personal passion is knowledge management – at some point we’ll manage to achieve what was envisioned in 1946 as the Memex. Once we do, there’s no end to what we can achieve as at that point we’re directly expanding human thought. I currently can say that I’ve never done a SharePoint implementation that hasn’t taken root in the organization. I work well independently, but prefer to work with collaborative teams. I’ve coached startups during my tenure at Microsoft and still evaluate and guide startups in my current role. My strengths are that I am always on the leading edge of technologies breaking into the mainstream, building new capabilities just before they are needed, and making sure whatever organization I’m in is on the cusp of new breakthroughs (read – maintaining the high margin edge every CEO wants.)

• Houston Techfest 118 Recordings

• Startup 1 Recording