Brad Vogel

Aviator, CTO MixMax

Adam Huda

Published in

Essential Engineering Podcast with Adam Huda

2 min readAug 17, 2017

On this episode of the Essential Cast — I sat down with Brad Vogel, CTO at MixMax.

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In the first part of the show we discussed Brad’s career history (Apple, Palm, Inkling, Mixmax) and his love of aviation.

We had a great conversation on why engineers make great pilots: analysis of accidents, checklists for everything, monitoring, and communication protocols.

In the second part of the show — as we always do— we got into a discussion on a range of engineering leadership topics.

Why situational awareness is important as a manager
How to use MixMax to manage your hiring process
How to create a hiring honey pot on GitHub for new talent by open sourcing by default
Why new engineers should join a startup instead of a big company
How to stand out as a sponsor at hackathons (Brad offers Lego kits as prizes and will stay up coding all night with students!)
How to create an internship program that adds real value and converts to full-time gigs
How to interview interns vs senior candidates
Why to hire for entrepreneurship (Brad wants his engineers to eventually quit and start their own companies!)
How the eng co-working meeting shares knowledge across the team
Why to conduct stay interviews (Brad wants to know what would cause/entice an engineer to leave well before they do)

Brad Vogel co-founded MixMax in 2014 and leds the engineering team. Prior to that: he led the Web Team at Inkling, worked on WebOS at Palm, and was an engineer on the Software Updates Team at Apple.

MixMax is the one product your company would use to communicate with the outside world — the future of email and external communications. Just like you use Slack to talk within your team, you use Mixmax to talk to people outside of your team.

Brad Vogel

Aviator, CTO MixMax

Written by Adam Huda