About a year ago, my friend Miles and I started organizing informal monthly lunches for startup engineering leaders in Boulder (contact me if you’re not on the list).

I’m past the point in my career where there’s much upside to showing up to a random networking happy hour, and have found a recurring informal lunch with high caliber people to be a nice alternative.  These lunches have evolved into a fertile breeding ground for fruitful mentor-mentee and peer conversations with others who were facing similar challenges as we were.

We’ve got engineers with 3 person teams and engineers with 30 person teams.  We’ve got b2b shops, b2c shops, and consulting shops.  It’s a lot of fun to compare and contrast our experiences with management, product design, hiring, technical architecture, and community.

The natural next evolution of this was to make these conversations accessibly to others that aren’t in startup hubs.  So this month, we turned it into a podcast.  It’s called Exec Podcast, and you access get it here.

Podcasting is a new format to me.  I really enjoy the stimulating conversations that can come out of having 30 minutes of focused time with another experienced engineer.  Check it out, and let me know on twitter if you have any comments, speaker suggestions, or topic requests.