Sherali Obidov

🚨 New Episode — The CTO as Orchestrator 🚨 Most people think CTOs write code. But the best ones? They orchestrate outcomes. In this week’s episode of The CTO Show With Mehmet Gonullu, I sat down with Naga Ravi Vadrevu , CTO at Wonderschool and former engineering leader at Square, to unpack what it really takes to lead tech today. We talked about: 🔹 Applying AI to a human-centric industry (childcare!) 🔹 Why code is becoming a commodity — and what matters more 🔹 Lessons from shutting down QA teams and scaling lean 🔹 Jobs-to-be-done thinking from Square 🔹 Deterministic APIs vs AI agents (and how to use both) 🔹 What first-time CTOs get wrong Whether you’re a startup operator, founder, or future CTO — this one’s a masterclass in tech leadership with first principles. 🎧 Available now on all podcast platforms + YouTube 📌 Links in the comments

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He grew a company 35x in one year to $250M+ at 25. He’s the same kid who came to US from Tehran at 10 without knowing a word of English. This is the untold story of Ali and micro1, which just cracked the top 10 on the Lean AI Leaderboard with $250M+ revenue and 80 employees. If you are building an AI company or want to sell to the top AI labs, read on for the full playbook. Ali built 2 companies before college. At Berkeley, he launched a software dev agency and started hiring international engineers. The interviews alone were eating 30–40 hours/week, so he built a tool to automate them, using GPT (one of the first AI recruiters in 2022). That insight eventually became micro1. For 2 years, it grew steadily with two business lines (an AI interviewer SaaS and an engineering marketplace) with happy customers. Then a data vendor approached Ali with an unusual request: hire 700 engineers to train AI models. That one conversation changed micro1’s trajectory. Ali realized they had accidentally built what every major AI lab desperately needed: a system to find, vet, and manage domain experts at scale across industries, at volume and fast. He then made a decision most founders would never make: He killed both working businesses and bet the entire company on going direct to labs, with no safety net or guarantee it would work. But the bet paid off, resulting in 35x growth, as they went from $7M ARR to $250M in one year. None of it came easy, and this level of growth became possible only after Ali solved the hardest problem: How to sell to AI labs where buyers are deeply technical and part of tight communities where reputation travels fast. So I spent 10+ hours going deep into how micro1 built, sold, and scaled within the AI ecosystem and turned it into an actionable playbook for founders who want to sell to researchers. Inside, you'll get: • The 3-stage sales sequence Ali uses to close research deals like OpenAI and xAI • How he got into Stanford research circles with no connections (and how that helped him close deals) • The dos and don’ts when researchers are evaluating you • How Elon Musk accidentally handed micro1 their biggest sales breakthrough • The net expansion playbook for enterprises and Fortune 500 companies (and what converts fastest) • The full AI stack that powers micro1's recruiting engine • The incentive philosophy Ali rebuilds individually for every core team member every quarter Originally, I put this together as a resource for founders I work with directly. But the ideas and insights are too valuable not to share, so I'm giving it away publicly. Want it? - Like and share this - Comment 'labs' - Follow me (if not following) Founders who crack AI sales at this hyperscale usually keep it close, but Ali shared every piece of it. So if you are building a business around frontier AI and research, grab this right away. It will save you months of costly relationship mistakes. Ali and team, welcome to the Leaderboard!

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Be very careful about job scammers ! I got this email from "Oracle" scammer and it likely uses my LI profile and AI to generate a personal job invite email. Details of this scam email below (TL;DR): The email from "Morgan Tuz" at "oracle-usa.com" is likely a scam. Key red flags include: 1. **Fake Domain**: "oracle-usa.com" is not Oracle’s official domain (oracle.com). It has a low trust score and is likely fraudulent. 2. **Gmail Usage**: Sending via Gmail ("morgan.tuz@oracle-usa.com via gmail.com") is unprofessional for Oracle recruiters, who use @oracle.com. 3. **Generic Flattery**: The email’s overly praising tone and generic references to your LinkedIn profile are common scam tactics. 4. **Resume Request**: Asking for your resume without job details suggests phishing for personal information. ### Actions - **Don’t Respond**: Avoid replying or sending personal info. - **Verify Directly**: Check Oracle’s official career site (oracle.com/careers). - **Report It**: Mark as spam/phishing and report to the FTC or Oracle. - **Secure Accounts**: Monitor accounts and enable two-factor authentication if you’ve engaged.

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That's why disaster recovery must not be neglected, especially in today's reality. One of Iran's first targets was AWS data centers. The more dependent society gets on cloud providers, the more important these become as military targets.

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Trump's $100K H-1B fees shatter Big Tech hiring (Business Insider). What was once a $2K paperwork headache now costs more than a senior DevOps engineer's annual salary. Outsourcing giants like Infosys and TCS are scrambling, and DevOps teams worldwide are feeling the heat. Here's what 8 years in DevOps reveals about surviving this global talent apocalypse: 1. H-1B unviable: Expect fewer foreign hires in the US. Rethink the American dream; remote excellence is key. 2. Nearshoring booms: Toronto, Mexico City, and São Paulo are the new hubs. As a Brazilian Cloud Architect, I've seen US firms build entire ops teams here. Pro tip: Polish your English and soft skills. 3. Remote/local surges: Hybrid models win. If you have experience in distributed team management, you're gold. That 3am call from Brazil covering US shifts? It's now your resume highlight. 4. TCS-like giants squeezed: Firms relying on 25-30% H-1B workers must adapt or shrink. For adaptable DevOps engineers, this means demand spikes in automation, AI generative tools, and multi-country service delivery. Stay ahead: Master cloud-native security and orchestration. 5. Diversify skills now: AI and automation are your visa-proof armor. Investing in IA generativa, cloud-native, and security isn't optional. Build international experience remotely. Your move: This week, audit your skills against these trends. Target nearshore opportunities, upskill in AI ops, and network across time zones. The old hiring playbook is dead. Tech is writing a resilient, global one. As a Brazilian Senior DevOps and Cloud Architect, this chaos actually opens doors. These policies won't blind the US to foreign talent, they'll force companies to hunt harder for skilled professionals like us. The internal American talent pool gets weaker, but our global expertise becomes premium. It's not just survival; it's opportunity for growth in a borderless DevOps world. What's your team's visa horror story? Share below 👇 You can read more about this on Business Insider: https://lnkd.in/dw-zuQNV #DevOpsCareers #TechCareers #CareerAdvice #GlobalTeams #H1B #DevOpsLeadership #TrumpVisa #TechChallenges #GlobalDevOps #CareerGrowth #TechHiring

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A couple of months ago, I went through some interviews and had a few... interesting experiences I wanted to share. I was interviewing with a company in the Human and AI coaching space. The first interviewer, a yo Turkish guy, showed up 4-5 minutes late and didn't bother to apologize. Not a great start. Throughout the call, he was distractingly moving his hand left to right—annoying, but whatever. He claimed he was an engineer, had managed a team of 150+ engineers at his last company, and even founded and sold an app. Sounded impressive, right? The real problem started when I asked him basic technical leadership questions. I'm talking about things like: - How do you manage application security for code changes? - What's your process for partial rollouts? - What's your rollback strategy when something goes wrong? - How do you handle production incidents? His answer was like, "We have a security team for that." So, I pressed him: "Okay, but what does the developer do for application security?" He answered some rubbish that was not even related. From a Senior Director, I expected some in-depth answers. He couldn't even handle simple questions a junior engineer could answer. I was just left wondering, how did this guy even get hired there? And it wasn't just that one place. I also interviewed with some CTOs and Principal Engineers at other companies who asked vague, nonsensical questions. At one point, a CTO actually admitted his friend offered him the job even though he "doesn't know the 'T' about CTO." It just reminds me of a CTO at one of my previous companies—that guy had probably never coded a line in his life or even opened a terminal, but there he was, the CTO. So, companies, please hire your people wisely and send the right people to the interview. #Interviewing #Hiring #TechnicalExcellence #HiringStandards

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Prediction: the #1 use of “A.I.” will be “customer service”. You'll be able to increase the amount of money you spend with a company easily, but it will not be able to cancel service without talking to a human. The “A.I.” agents will make it excruciatingly hard to get to a human to cancel service. It is already happening. Take a look at how Amazon's customer service and returns have morphed into dark patterns over the past two years. The “human in the loop” will be used exclusively to the company's advantage, never to assist you.

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Searching for work on LinkedIn or Indeed, etc. It's broken. I see more and more posts and very frustrated people applying for dozens or hundreds of jobs without getting anything. There are many reasons why this can happen that I list below, but it is a reality that the job market is apparently very complicated. This does not mean that it is impossible to apply for several jobs, get interviews, pass them successfully and find a good job on these platforms. But maybe how you are using them is not the correct way. In my entire professional career I have not gotten a job by applying through LinkedIn, however I have gotten most of my jobs here. So how does it work? The most successful way to find a job through these platforms is divided into 4 aspects: - Have the profile optimized for the job you are looking for. - Have valuable connections that can approach or recommend you to positions. - Be a present user. This is perhaps the most important thing. And not only on LinkedIn, but having a portfolio, if you code a good GitHub, or writing blogs and articles, in general sharing your knowledge. - Have an updated CV in a good format that passes automatic screenings and details the value you add and have added in your previous jobs In 2016 I was about to graduate from my master's degree in Mexico and in order to stay in the country I started looking for jobs in the data science area. I considered that my profile was good, detailed, with experience, studies, portfolio, etc. but after applying to more than 100 positions (in which some did respond to me and I got some interviews), I got a job when I started sharing my knowledge and got noticed by recruiters. In this era, it is not enough to have preparation, studies, experience, and extensive knowledge in your area, you need to be visible. In subsequent posts I will explain better how to build your profile to achieve better results. However, there comes a point in your career where your connections, clients, former colleagues, become crucial to moving up the business ladder. If you have visibility and add this adequate networking, you are on the way to getting a good job. Nobody gives us or owes us anything, we must be responsible when they refer us or help us, since the reputation of those people is also at stake, so take it seriously. At the moment, if you keep applying and applying and you don't get a job or you don't get a good salary proposal, or a good company where you want to spend years of your life, take into consideration the 4 aspects that I mentioned above. Additionally: - Make sure you are using a good template for your CV. - Detail in your resume who you are, what you know how to do and how you add value. - Prepare a lot for interviews, even if you think you “know everything”, give yourself the time to practice and learn. If you have questions about how to start, write your comments below. #Job #AI #Employment #jobs #recruiting

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When Steve Huynh was a principal engineer at Amazon, meetings began with a "study hall." Amazon had a "reading culture" even among engineers, Huynh recently told the Pragmatic Engineer podcast, speaking of his time at the tech giant. Employees frequently drafted six-page memos, which they shared with the company to update progress and demonstrate new projects. Huynh, who said the company's embrace of writing and reading the memos was part of its "secret sauce," said employees' writing was often constrained to the format, whether it was a business strategy or press release. Huynh started at Amazon in 2006, only a few years after the company turned its first profit and while Jeff Bezos was at the helm. Read more about how Bezos instilled this culture of memo-writing from the top down on Business Insider: https://lnkd.in/gBqbEf_j (Credit: Daniel Berman) #amazon #reading #jeffbezos

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AWS Aurora Stateful Blue-Green The most existing blue-green implementations that I know relate to the stateless services. Stateful services are rarely became a subject of blue-green. The main reason is the high cost of copying production data between versions. But in some cases we need to provide strong guarantees that the next upgrade will not break our production. AWS tried to solve this issue introducing Aurora blue green deployment. The marketing part sounds good (https://lnkd.in/dmVxdXDZ): You can make changes to the Aurora DB cluster in the green environment without affecting production workloads... When ready, you can _switch over_ the environments to transition the green environment to be the new production environment. The switchover typically takes under a minute with no data loss and no need for application changes. But let's check how it works: 🔸 A new Aurora cluster with the same configuration and topology is created. It has a new service name with a green- prefix. 🔸 The new cluster can have a higher version and other set of database parameters than a production cluster. 🔸 Logical replication is established between a production and a new green cluster. 🔸 The green cluster is readonly by default. Enabling write operations can cause replication conflicts. 🔸 Once green database is tested, it's possible to perform a switchover. The names and endpoints of the current production environment is assigned to a newly created cluster. In simple words, it's just a new cluster that copies data from production using logical replication feature. And as a result it inherits all restrictions of that feature (https://lnkd.in/dEBQG2-p) such as missed DDL operations, no replication for large objects, lack of extensions support and others. So you need to be very careful deciding to use this approach. For me it looks like this solution is suitable only for very basic scenarios with simple data types. Anything more complex won't work. #engineering #systemdesign #bluegreen

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If you're a Senior Engineer looking to move up, the next role will likely be a Staff Engineer. And in this guide, Shruti shares tips from her own experience of getting promoted to Staff Engineer at PayPal and Slack. She talks about what Staff Engineers do (and how it's different from Seniors), why you might not be getting promoted, and how to take that next step. https://lnkd.in/g58dnFEG

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Hiring one mid-level engineer in the U.S. under H-1B rules can cost ~$307,000 in the first year. In Pakistan, a comparable remote engineer costs $20,000–$35,000 per year. That’s a 10–15× saving. For the cost of one H-1B engineer in the U.S., a company could instead outsource an entire remote team in Pakistan including 1 Product Manager 3 Software Engineers 1 QA Tester 1 UI/UX Designer and still spend less than half of the U.S. cost. This allows startups and enterprises alike to deliver full projects offshore at a fraction of the budget. If even 5–10% of U.S. H-1B demand shifts offshore, Pakistan’s IT export revenues (currently ~$3.5–4B annually) could increase by $1–2B in 3 years. The disruption to Indian IT firms opens the door for Pakistan to capture more contracts, especially in software development, fintech, and product outsourcing. Pakistan’s cost advantage makes it attractive for outsourcing, but long-term success depends on more than low prices. To become a true strategic partner, the workforce must strengthen soft skills, business understanding, and professional setups like reliable internet, modern offices, and time-zone alignment.

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The US is imposing a $100,000 annual fee on H-1B visa applications. This is great news for domestic American software developers. They'll face less competition, boosting their edge and driving salaries even higher. Bad news for devs in Canada and Europe: With fewer H-1B slots in the US, more lower-paid talent from developing countries may flock to your markets, potentially pushing salaries down further. Being a software dev isn't what it used to be. Time to kickstart that indie project if you haven't already! 🚀 #indiedev #h1b #Europe #EU #US #Canada

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