#898 TECH TITANS: Our Best Advice on Communication and Hiring Strategies with Mark Porter, CTO at dbt Labs
This is some of the best advice we’ve ever heard on managing teams.
Today, we're talking to Mark Porter, CTO at dbt Labs. We discuss why knowing your audience is the foundation of effective communication, how to create psychological safety for escalation without surprises, and why hiring remarkable talent requires unconventional tactics like asking for negative references and spending six hours with final candidates.
Thank you to Digital Ocean for sponsoring this episode. For simple cloud and powerful AI that’s built to scale, check out Digital Ocean here.
All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast!
To get learn more about dbt Labs, check out their website here.
About Mark Porter
Mark Porter has held a number of technical executive roles in his career. He currently serves as Chief Technical Officer (CTO) of dbt Labs, helping lead companies to understand and process their data better. Prior to dbt Labs, he was the CTO of MongoDB, where he was responsible for crafting the long-term technology roadmap and vision for the company. Prior to MongoDB, Mark was CTO of Core Technology and Transport at Grab, Southeast Asia’s super app that provides everyday services such as ride-hailing, food, package, grocery delivery, mobile payments and financial services to millions of people, from October 2018 to July 2020. Previously, Mark was a General Manager at Amazon Web Services, from May 2013 to October 2018, where he led the Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon Aurora and RDS for PostgreSQL, the AWS Database Migration Service, and the AWS Schema Conversion Tool. Prior to Amazon, Mark held various roles including CTO of the Amplify division of NewsCorp and Vice President of Engineering at Oracle Corporation, as well as working at NASA/JPL and being an early member of the Oracle Database Kernel group.
He has been professionally coding since he was 16 years old and founded and ran his own electronics services integration company. Mark currently serves on the Board of Directors and Audit Committee of GitLab, the leading DevSecOps company. Mark previously served on the Board of Directors of MongoDB and on the Board of Directors of Splyt, a global mobility company. He also served as a Board Advisor to MariaDB, a database company. Mark also serves as a member of the Board of Directors or as an advisor to various private companies.
He holds a BS in Engineering and Applied Science from Caltech.
Mark has been married for 25 years and splits his time between the US and Europe. He has five grown children.
About dbt Labs
Since 2016, dbt Labs has been on a mission to help data practitioners create and disseminate organizational knowledge. dbt is the standard for AI-ready structured data. Powered by the dbt Fusion engine, it unlocks the performance, context, and trust that organizations need to scale analytics in the era of AI. Globally, more than 60,000 data teams use dbt, including those at Siemens, Roche and Condé Nast.