Dev Interrupted
Dev Interrupted is the go-to podcast for software engineering leadership. Each week, hosts Andrew Zigler, Ben Lloyd Pearson, and Dan Lines sit down with industry experts to explore the strategies, struggles, and stories behind high-performing software teams. Paired with weekly industry news coverage, the conversations dive deep into the real challenges that define excellence in modern tech.
Dev Interrupted
The CTO must now think like the CFO to survive | Sancus Ventures’ Lake Dai
AI is forcing engineering leaders to become part-CFO, part-governance expert, and part-business strategist. Are you ready for the shift?
We're joined by Lake Dai, a globally recognized AI expert, professor at Carnegie Mellon, and founder of Sancus Ventures, to explore the new operating strategies required in an AI-first era. She explains why AI has evolved from a simple tool to a core business metric that leaders are held accountable for on earnings calls. This new reality introduces massive new compute costs—sometimes 30-50% of OpEx—forcing leaders to adopt the financial foresight of a CFO to forecast and justify spending.
Beyond the balance sheet, Lake identifies AI governance as the biggest blind spot for most leaders today, outlining the urgent need for an AI handbook to manage unit, system, and ethical risks. This strategic shift also reshapes the engineering org itself, from managing hybrid teams of humans and agents to the need for new training environments, almost like "AI flight simulators." This episode is an essential briefing on these new complexities, all centered on Lake's most urgent advice: in a world moving this fast, the best strategy is to slow down and focus on the fundamentals.
LinearB: Your AI productivity journey starts here
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Referenced in today's show:
- I didn't believe it until I saw it: but it *really* works in open offices! And you cannot even hear devs "whispering."
- Councils of agents
- If you don't tinker, you don't have taste
- I invited strangers to message me through a receipt printer
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