Brian Childress: The Fractional CEO
Scouting for Growth
Sabine VdL
5 • 1.8K Ratings
🗓️ 12 June 2024
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Do you want exclusive bonus content for free? Please fill out this survey to get just that as well as getting your say about the future of this podcast including content ideas and future guests.
On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Brian Childress, a seasoned technology executive & fractional CTO with over 15 years of experience helping businesses in healthcare, finance, education & more develop and scale their technology solutions.
In this episode we dive into Brian's journey to becoming a fractional CTO, the most common challenges he sees businesses facing with technology, his advice for non-technical founders, and his predictions for the game-changing technologies of the future. We'll also explore topics like how to mitigate the risks of outsourcing development work, best practices for application security & scalability, strategies for closing the tech talent gap through global hiring, & the importance of collecting the right data to leverage AI effectively.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Fractionality is a trend where you’re trying to find access to a high level of expertise even though you may not have the work or capital to employ them full-time. If we’re honest with ourselves there’s not 40 hours worth of work to do in a lot of organisations or in a number of roles, so if I can come in & make high impact in an organisation for a fraction of the cost, that’s really valuable.
- One of the biggest things that’s helped me is that day-to-day I do software engineering work, but through most of my career I’ve been freelancing & moonlighting on the side, so I’ve doubled the amount of exposure & experience I’ve been able to gain in my career by working with a number of different organisations, teams, projects & technologies. I’m drawing on ever single one of those experiences to help & support the teams I work with.
- One of the biggest challenges I see for non-technical founders is understanding what advice they should be following. Technology can be a black box that’s really hard to understand & for non-technical founders there are a lot of people that look & sound like they understand technology & unfortunately they could be giving bad advice.
- We make things too complex too early, many of us think we have the next great idea & it’s going to be huge right out of the gate & we need to build so we can support millions of customers from day 1. That’s never the case. But, a lot of the guidance that’s out there is from the Googles and the Netflixs of the world & we build our architecture around these organisations. But, we forget that they have thousands of people to support those architectures & complexity, & they have millions of users to support.
BEST MOMENTS
‘It’s a fraction of the cost, not the expertise.’
‘Don’t follow the advice of the first person to come to you, it puts a lot of founders and companies in bad positions.’
‘Building in complexity from the outset hurts us all the way through the growth of our business.’
‘What is the most simple set of technologies & solutions that we can put together that solves a real business need? A lot of those boring technologies can be scaled up to support millions of users & billions of requests, we just have to be smart about the way we do it.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Brian Childress is a seasoned technology executive & fractional CTO with over 15 years of experience helping businesses in healthcare, finance, education &more develop and scale their technology solutions.
As a technical advisor with a strong background in software engineering, cloud computing, & cybersecurity, Brian is experienced in helping CTOs & CEOs make the right technical decisions for their organisations.
ABOUT THE HOST
Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, and commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers, accelerated over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | The Our guest today on scouting for growth is Brian Childress. A season technology executive and fractional CTO with over 15 years of experience helping businesses in health care, finance, education, and more develop and scale their technology solutions. |
| 0:34.7 | As a technical advisor with a strong background in software engineering, |
| 0:40.5 | cloud computing and cyber security. |
| 0:44.0 | Brian is experienced in helping CTOs and CEOs make the right technical decisions in their organizations. So some of its key for K-Seria includes today, |
| 0:57.6 | application securities, capability, technology strategy, outsourcing risk, and staying on top of emerging tech trends. |
| 1:05.4 | Through his work as a fractional CTO, Brian is able to bring his technical depth and expertise to multiple organizations working closely with leadership |
| 1:17.7 | teams on everything from software architecture to cyber security. |
| 1:24.0 | And he takes a pragmatic approach to delivering tangible results that drives real business impact. |
| 1:31.0 | In addition to his functional work, actually, Brian is passionate about empowering founders and leaders |
| 1:37.1 | with the knowledge they need to build great products and companies. |
| 1:42.0 | He also frequently share insight on technology leadership, scaling software startups |
| 1:46.5 | and navigating the evolving tech landscape on values platform and particularly LinkedIn too. |
| 1:58.0 | So in our conversation today and particularly in T. C. C.S. T. T. T. T. |
| 2:00.0 | The most common challenge is ECE's businesses facing with technology, |
| 2:05.9 | is advised for non-technical founders and its predictions for technologies of the future. |
| 2:13.0 | We will also explore topics like how to mitigate the risk of outsourcing development work, |
| 2:18.0 | best practices for application security and scalability, |
| 2:21.0 | strategies for cruising the technology talent gap through global hiring and the importance of collecting the right data to leverage AI effectively. |
| 2:31.0 | If you are a founder, a CEO, a CEO, or whether you are leading a technology team looking |
| 2:36.2 | to make smarter decisions about technology in your organization, you will not want to miss |
| 2:42.0 | this episode. So stay tuned, pause this insightful |
| 2:46.9 | discussion with Brian Childress the fractional CTO. Hi Brian, thank you so much for joining me on Scouting for Growth today. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Sabine VdL, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Sabine VdL and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.