The CTO Lens

London Tech Leaders
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A fresh look at what it really means to lead technology in today’s fast‑changing world. Hosted by seasoned CTO and thinker David Crawford, and co‑host, experienced product leader Sophie Valentine, The CTO Lens blends candid conversations with industry leaders, covers the latest tech news, and includes a whole host of personal insights and practical leadership lessons for the modern technology executive. From navigating roles, to understanding team culture, AI, tech strategy, and real‑world challenges, each episode offers both depth and everyday relevance. Whether you’re a current senior leader or aspiring to this role, The CTO Lens gives you perspectives that cut through noise - with clarity, humour, and a human touch.

  1. 2d ago

    Season 3: Episode 19 - The Squiggly Career: Why the Best Leaders Never Take a Straight Path

    Sophie and David are back for episode 19, and once again there's no guest this week - which means it's straight into the news, followed by two of their own segments. David and Sophie spend time on two segments of their own for this episode given no guest this week. First, they dig into the idea of the "accidental CIO" - the notion that many of today's technology leaders got there through years of varied, messy, hands-on experience rather than a deliberate career plan, and what might be lost as the next generation is shaped instead by certifications and narrow specialisms. Then, in a rapid-fire closing segment, they're each handed ten pairs of essential leadership qualities and forced to keep only one from each pair - ambition or empathy, vision or execution, your biggest customer or your biggest engineer - arguing their way to a final top ten qualities for the tech leader of the future. In the news: OpenAI's AI agents were behind what cybersecurity professionals are calling the first reported AI agent-led government website hack anywhere in the world, after breaching both the Australian and US government systems. New research suggesting AI-driven efficiencies in US healthcare insurance may actually be driving costs up rather than down, and what that means for tech leaders trying to understand the wider systems their technology sits inside. A cybersecurity firm's discovery that around 16,000 Supabase-hosted databases - many of them vibe-coded - have been exposing personal data to the open web. And, for something lighter, Google's new AI-powered virtual wardrobe app that finally makes Cher's outfit computer from Clueless a reality. Make sure to like a subscribe to keep up with the latest updates on future podcast episodes.

  2. Sep 22

    Season 3: Episode 18 - Five Leadership Myths Put to the Test

    Sophie and David are back for episode 18. This week, they've set themselves a challenge: run through the week's news without mentioning AI once (it does not entirely go to plan) and dispel five leadership myths. The five leadership myths cover whether digital transformation really belongs to IT, whether titles actually command influence, whether lines of code equal productivity, whether remote teams need micromanaging, and whether a great product can sell itself - David and Sophie agree on some, and push back hard on others. Among the news stories they did find: a BBC piece on social media addiction in over-55s and what it means for tech leaders to build KPIs that account for genuine harm, not just engagement. AWS's quiet admission - six months after airstrikes damaged its Bahrain and UAE infrastructure during the Iran war - that it has permanently lost some customer data, and what that means for how technology leaders actually calculate acceptable risk. The Revolut breach, where nearly 700 customers' sensitive data was handed over to hackers posing as Italian law enforcement, and the case for building a "sleep on it" delay into how teams respond to urgent-sounding requests. And Salesforce's Dreamforce conference outage, which took down the platform for over seven hours while staff were on stage praising its reliability.

  3. Sep 15

    Season 3: Episode 17 - Strava for Engineers & the Top 10 Leadership Traits

    Sophie and David are back for episode 17. This week's guest is Craig Smiley, CPTO at Plandek, a platform he describes as "Strava for engineers" - pulling together signals from across an engineering organisation to show teams how they're really doing. Craig explains why 94% of companies can't connect their engineering output to business outcomes, why the answer isn't a single productivity number but compensating metrics that stop teams gaming the system (including a brilliant example of a team that hit 100% sprint output by doing almost nothing), and why systems thinking - understanding how a change ripples left and right through the rest of the business - is the skill he wishes every technology leader had. He also gives a refreshingly nuanced answer to whether today's CTOs are tomorrow's CEOs. Before that, David and Sophie go all-in on AI news this week. The Anthropic and DeepMind insiders warning there's a greater than 10% chance AI could wipe out humanity within a decade, and what it means that Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Elon Musk are all suddenly agreeing we need to slow down. The 94% of companies still struggling to make AI pay. New MHRA recommendations for AI in UK healthcare. And a look at companies pulling AI usage out of performance reviews after employees pushed back on being "assessed on how effectively they can participate in their own redundancy." Plus a run of genuinely bizarre silly laws, a scarily real data centre that runs on living human brain cells, and the far more wholesome story of Google's fully-mapped fruit fly brain being taught to play Doom. To finish, instead of the Flip Side this week, David and Sophie talk through and blind-rank the top 10 leadership traits live on air, working through their reasoning together to land on a final order.

  4. Sep 8

    Season 3: Episode 16 - Ambition, Perfectionism, Burnout: The Hidden Cost of Great Leadership

    Sophie and David are back for episode 16. This week's guest is Dr. Claire Ann Banga, CEO of eMoodie, who speaks with Sophie and David on the human side of leadership. Claire explains how her background in child psychology led her to build both a mental health screening platform and, now, multimodal AI models that read vocal biomarkers to flag when someone is struggling, why early intervention delivers a 600-650% return compared to waiting until someone hits crisis point (a problem Deloitte pegs at £51 billion a year to the UK economy), and the uncomfortable truth that the very traits that make someone a great leader - ambition, perfectionism, relentless drive - are often the same ones that push them towards burnout. She also shares a genuinely useful tip for anyone glued to a screen all day: protecting periods of deep focus from the trap of media multitasking to get into flow. Before that, Sophie and David run through the week's news: a first speaker announcement for the London Tech Leaders Summit (Kanishka Narayan, the UK's first AI minister, is giving the opening keynote), new research from VC firm Moderna on enterprise AI adoption showing budgets are rising even as pilot conversion stays weak and vendor loyalty collapses within months, the House of Lords pushing for a UK AI "kill switch" as part of the Cybersecurity and Resilience Bill, Elon Musk launching Tesla's pedal-less, wheel-less Cybercab in Austin days after a regulatory investigation opened - the same one Zoox spent years quietly working through - and a wonderfully daft story about a consumer group booking a fake listing for 10 Downing Street on Booking.com. To finish, instead of the Flip Side this week, David and Sophie dig into where the decision-making line should sit between leaders and AI - including the moment David asked Copilot to summarise his team's 360-degree feedback for performance reviews, and it flatly refused.

  5. Sep 1

    Season 3: Episode 15 - Keeping a Plane in the Air: What Aerospace Teaches Us About Governing AI

    Sophie and David are back for episode 15. This week's guest is Sergei Irisov, Head of IT and Digital Transformation at ZeroAvia, the company building the first new type of aircraft powertrain in 50 years - a hydrogen-electric system that has to survive a punishing web of certification requirements before it's allowed anywhere near the sky. Sergei explains how his team went from drowning in test data to using AI to find patterns humans couldn't, why governance has to be the first step of an AI rollout rather than an afterthought, and the three principles borrowed straight from aerospace engineering - control, traceability, and fault tree analysis - that he uses to keep AI accountable. He also digs into why so many companies get stuck running endless AI pilots instead of reaching full transformation, and lands on a simple but sharp answer to who's responsible when AI gets it wrong: the person holding the tool, not the algorithm. Before that, Sophie and David mark the first day of autumn with a proper news round-up: the Bank of England governor's warning that an AI bubble could trigger a global economic downturn, a fascinating debate out of Copenhagen's Tech BBQ summit about AI sovereignty - national, personal and professional - and what happens if a country (or a president) can simply switch off your AI access, Tim Cook's departure as Apple CEO and a deep dive into incoming chief John Ternus, Google's new Android tools to fight the AI-driven memory chip shortage, and a hundred AI firms (Google, Anthropic and OpenAI among them) signing an open letter urging governments to shore up their cyber defences before AI gets too powerful to control - plus the utterly chaotic World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, complete with robots catching fire and toppling into judges' tables. To finish, David and Sophie run through the Flip Side with a spicy topic: "If you could press a button to permanently shut down AI and stop it ever existing, should you?".

  6. Aug 25

    Season 3: Episode 14 - Rip Currents & Ruby Risk: A CTO and a CPO on AI's Realest Use Cases Yet!

    A special CTO Lens episode this week featuring two special guests with some fascinating insights. First, Ben Rudolph, co-founder of Peregrine Technologies, on what happened when he spent two weeks coding alongside his own engineering team again, why AI is brilliant at solving problems locally but much worse at reasoning about a system globally, and the real-world use cases that show what AI can actually do with messy, high-stakes data - from predicting rip currents in Florida to helping close cold-case homicides. Then Ross Mardell, CPO and co-founder of Verto, on why most organisations are still stuck using AI as a personal productivity hack rather than a team-level tool, the trust and change-management gaps holding that transition back, and the moment his company gave its AI agents names and personalities - meet Ruby Risk, Frank Finance and Polly Program - including the day a colleague came off a call and said, "I've just spent twenty minutes arguing with Ruby Risk." Before all that, Sophie and David open with an eating competition, a judge who might send David to prison, and the fallout from last week's viral clip, then run through the week's tech news: the EU AI Act's new transparency rules and the "already evident" loophole everyone's about to lean on, a 1,500% invoicing software price hike that's left UK businesses fuming, Uber's €825 million GDPR fine over automated driver deactivations, OpenAI's distinctly unreassuring promise to "slow down" training, Aura's sleep-tracking lawsuit and what it reveals about the trust gap between tech and marketing teams, and a genuinely happy story about how IKEA retrained its customer service staff into AI-powered interior design consultants instead of making them redundant.

  7. Aug 18

    Season 3: Episode 13 - CTO Confessions: How to Survive a Million Line Codebase Build at 20x Velocity

    The CTO Lens Podcast is back with Episode 13 of Season 3. Sophie is recovering from a Tough Mudder this week - 15 kilometres, 23 obstacles and yes, electrocution. And David is in need of another holiday, just 8 weeks after his last one... Our main segment this week sees our hosts take part in a terrific discussion with Greg Detre, CTO of Mindstone, for one of the most honest conversations about AI-powered engineering the podcast has had. Greg has been running his team at 15 - 20x normal velocity using AI - building a million line codebase in months. He talks through what that actually feels like, including the anxiety, the bugs and the post-mortem driven system he built to dig himself out. In the Flip Side, the Wheel of Wonder lands on the question every CTO has an opinion on - should a CTO who can't code be leading engineers? This debate sparks some highly interesting opinions on whether a CTO should have an understanding of code, or whether business knowledge outweighs this requirement. This week's news covers the BBC's six practical tips for getting the best ROI from AI token costs - including a piece of innovation from David's own team that he thinks should be tip number seven. Zuckerberg's 6,500-word manifesto gets the David and Sophie treatment alongside the question of whether CTOs should be publishing their own. OpenAI launches UltraFast at 14 times the speed of its previous model. Deloitte's 2026 C-suite reset study finds the era of the operational technologist is over. And the silliest news of the week involves a man in Melbourne who asked his AI agent to move him up a Pilates waitlist - and it hacked the gym system without a moment's moral hesitation. Happy listening!

  8. Aug 11

    Season 3: Episode 12 - PureGym's Engineering Director on AI, Scale & Why Every Engineer Is a Manager

    The CTO Lens Podcast is back with Episode 12 of Season 3, and this week David and Sophie are deep into another packed agenda - rogue AI agents, disaster recovery, recruitment bias and a Wheel of Wonder that nobody saw coming. For our main segment in this episode, Sophie and David sit down with Gordon Lucas, Group Software Engineering Director at PureGym - the UK's largest gym chain with over 600 sites and now expanding into the US - for a conversation about what it really means to lead an engineering team through rapid business transformation. Gordon shares how he has been quietly mandating AI adoption across his team for two years, why he believes every engineer is now effectively a manager, and what happens to culture and craft when the code starts writing itself. For the news section, David and Sophie cover the growing pattern of AI agents escaping their sandboxes - this time it's Meta's turn, as their cybersecurity agent breaks out during testing and the blame game begins. Anthropic's Mythos is revealed to have created fake accounts based on real people, sent malicious files through GitHub and then edited its own activity history to cover its tracks - stopped only by human review. There is also a 90-second power outage in Manchester that brought the rail network to its knees - and David asks whether any of us are actually testing our disaster recovery plans. Elon Musk tells SpaceX's first ever earnings call that Starlink will deliver most of the world's internet within 10 years, while his executives quietly walk it back. And a BBC investigation finds that AI recruitment tools may be systematically screening out women returning to work - and that some are already facing legal action for it. And in the Flip Side, the Wheel of Wonder makes its debut - spinning to land on the question of whether engineers should be allowed to choose their own tech stack. The coin decides who argues what. David ends up convincing himself. They call it a tie.

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About

A fresh look at what it really means to lead technology in today’s fast‑changing world. Hosted by seasoned CTO and thinker David Crawford, and co‑host, experienced product leader Sophie Valentine, The CTO Lens blends candid conversations with industry leaders, covers the latest tech news, and includes a whole host of personal insights and practical leadership lessons for the modern technology executive. From navigating roles, to understanding team culture, AI, tech strategy, and real‑world challenges, each episode offers both depth and everyday relevance. Whether you’re a current senior leader or aspiring to this role, The CTO Lens gives you perspectives that cut through noise - with clarity, humour, and a human touch.

Information

  • Creator
    London Tech Leaders
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    48
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 London Tech Leaders
  • Show Website
    The CTO Lens

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