On February 28th, 2013, New York's Tech in Motion held their Inaugural Speaker Series, featuring Pete Miron, the Senior Vice President from Bitly.
The event was a huge success; it consisted of a 45 minute interview where Pete described his background, a general direction on how he became a SVP, behind the scenes of being a SVP at Bitly, and advice to aspiring CTOs and VPs.
Check out a few of the questions Pete addressed:
Where did you get your start, and what specifically got you interested in computers?
I actually got my start with old Commodore computers when I was just a kid tinkering around at home. I was fascinated at what I could create on the computer, even simple and rudimentary programs. When I got to college, I realized I just wanted to get out of college as quickly as possible and get into the tech and internet industry, so I majored in Art History. I learned a lot about art and philosophy, which actually helped me a bit over the course of my career because it gave me different perspective.
Talk us through your first career challenge and how you solved it.
Well, the first problem I solved wasn’t very interesting. However, I do have a funny story about when I was over at Datek. I was TRYING to solve a problem, but I actually ended up CAUSING a larger problem in the process. It was a simple enough idea of allowing people who were using the system to save their stock portfolios on our server. Back at this time, every morning when our clients logged in, they would have to manually enter all of their stock symbols each and every day. It was laborious and time consuming, but the technology to save it on the server was new. Bottom line is that I deployed my code the night before and the next morning all of Datek’s servers seized up for several hours while angry stock brokers called our service line threatening to cancel their service. It was a stressful experience, but my CTO at the time was incredibly understanding and helped me through it. That taught me about responsibility and leadership.
What are some of the necessary skills that you needed to get to this point in your career?
I think the most important skill is to know when to get involved and when to step back and let your developers just do their work. Managing developers requires a lot of finesse, and that has taken years to develop. I tried to pull lessons from each and every experience of my life and learn from them and then put those lessons learned into practice.
Pete's Background:
Pete Miron, SVP of Engineering at Bitly since May, 2012 where he's expanding the team to move from an essential piece of internet infrastructure to building great social media sharing, saving, analysis and discovery products customers love. Pete builds teams focused on quickly delivering products and features to large numbers of adoring fans.
Prior to Bitly, Pete joined Knewton as CTO in 2008, where he built a team that delivered a continuously adaptive education system for test prep, math readiness and now integrated with major education publishers. The Knewton team delivered products that helped students get into the schools of their dreams, and vastly improve the likelihood that other college students will graduate. In 2011, Knewton was named: a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, one of the World's 50 Most Innovative Tech Companies by FastCompany and in 2010, one of Crain's 50 Best Places to Work in NYC.
Pete also led teams to deliver innovative products in Telecom (Vonage) and Brokerage (Datek).
Pete holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art History from Syracuse University.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/petemiron
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/petermiron
Interested in attending a Tech in Motion meetup? Watch this short video to get an idea of what our events are like! http://vimeo.com/61030811
Related: Tech in Motion, Events, Inspiration