It’s not quite a year since my last post on this, but December 2024 is going to be busy so I’m making sure I do it now rather than miss it. This is the second year of running “1st Wednesday” – a curated meetup for London CTOs/VPEs/Tech leaders.
Purpose
The core purpose and nature of the events has stayed the same this year, just a few tweaks around the edges.
- All new joiners are now manually interviewed before their first event – originally this wasn’t 100% the case, but after some misfires I’ve put my foot down and made it mandatory for everyone, no exceptions
- “CTO” was always a placeholder, and led to some people (that we’d have welcomed) being unsure if they’d fit in (the interviews mentioned above helped uncover – and correct – this). So I’ve tried to be consistent this year with describing it as being: “CTO, VPE, Staff+ Engineers”. But it’s a bit more inclusive than this — more on that below (see ‘joining’ section)
- Similarly I’ve been more explicit that the primary rule for attendance is “You’ve got to the point in your career where you realised that almost all non-trivial tech problems are actually people problems in disguise”, and you’ve started working on that.
(for refresh on the core purpose(s), see last year’s summary, and the ‘Purpose’ section)
Stats
Average attendance figures are up 80% year on year, which is good (at the end of last year I’d said: “I’m hoping we can get attendance to about 2x”).
The announcement-only mailing list – made up of people who’ve attended the events and chosen to keep coming back – is now at 55 members.
…whereas the proportion of ‘regulars’ to ‘first-timers’ at each event is starting to look cyclical: a big surge of newcomers in December/January (work gets quieter, people have more time to network?), which predictably drops off during the year (most people who come once come multiple times).
Ideas and changes for 2025
Broadly speaking it seems to be working as intended, no big changes planned. But a few things I’ve been considering that *might* happen next year:
- Some of our CTO attendees have no Engineering background (they came from Product careers); that’s absolutely fine and they fit-in perfectly. But a few have worried that they wouldn’t be technical enough. Maybe we can tweak the presentation/description to reduce those fears.
- We’ve rejected a few pure-Product people. While Product is critical to a CTO’s success it’s only one part among many, and so far it seems to be the right choice to insist on people with at least tech responsibility. BUT … I empathise with the people yearning for a similar event, and while I’ve been directing them to Product-centric communities in London, maybe there’s something more pro-active we can do there. For instance: maybe there’s enough demand for an additional event with a different audience (either a parallel track, or a broader group). But I have limited time to devote to this, so I’m not currently planning on doing more.
Things that WON’T change:
- We’ve had pure-Marketing people ask to come, and various “Business Development” (i.e. Sales). Some of them legitimately just want to understand CTOs better so they can work more constructively with us – but unfortunately their presence would break some of the conversations and core ambience that are why our attendees keep coming back.
- Similarly the presence of Investors, and Talent Search/Recruiters – it stops it from being a safe space for us (at CTO level you have to be careful about the reputation you have among non-tech C-levels and the people they interact with; many of our conversations are robust and detailed (all under the Chatham House rule) and we need a safe space for those to happen).
- A room full of CTO/VPE is a luscious target for sales people trying to make their commission this quarter – especially in Enterprise sales. No, no, no. This is not the venue for that activity – sorry, guys! (and if you manage to find your way in: it WILL backfire; CTOs love to gossip, and word will spread)
Joining our events
If you think you’d benefit from joining our events – contact me and lets meet for coffee. Better to have a chat and find out than over-think it.
If you’d like to join our future events, email: “adam.m.s.martin+1stwednesday at gmail.com” – generally we aim to be as inclusive as possible, but there is some filtering to keep the focus on people working in/on/around tech and leadership (please include your LinkedIn page so I can check this).
Bear in mind: there are some people who don’t fit any of these roles, and that’s fine too – we’re not exclusive, and diversity of thought, experience, and opinion is always good. But for reference, most of our regulars have titles such as: “Director of Engineering”, “VP Engineering”, “Senior Software Director”, “Staff Engineer”, “Founding CTO”, “Senior Software Engineer”, “Head of Engineering”, “Principal Engineer”.