Scaling teams
How experienced leaders grow engineering organizations without losing clarity, ownership, or momentum.
Where tech leaders speak freely.
Meetings are currently happening in Poland đ”đ±.
The idea
The most valuable conversations for technology leaders happen face to face.
Leadership can be surprisingly isolating. Most conversations happen in scheduled calls, Slack threads, or public formats that reward polished answers over honest ones. CTO Room creates space for more candid, grounded discussion between people who understand the pressures firsthand.
Who is in the room
Senior engineering leaders who carry real responsibility.
A curated community of CTOs, VPs Engineering, and Heads of Engineering from startups, scaleups, and technology-driven companies.
These are decision-makers: people accountable for real technology outcomes. When you are responsible for the result, every tradeoff in platform, security, data, AI, hiring, and delivery feels different.
The community is intentionally small, curated, and built around trust rather than scale.
Real problems
Practical conversations about the pressure points of modern engineering leadership.
AI in delivery
How AI execution actually works in practice across engineering teams, beyond shiny demos, vendor narratives, and slideware.
Cloud & platform complexity
How teams make platform decisions, manage complexity, and balance reliability with speed.
Enterprise readiness
Lessons from building secure, reliable, scalable products for demanding enterprise environments.
Building in regulated environments
How technology leaders build and ship in regulated contexts while balancing compliance, speed, security, and product ambition.
Architecture decisions
How technical leaders make consequential architecture choices when the right answer is rarely obvious.
Not a sales event
Invite-only, curated, and based on trust.
CTO Room is not a meetup, vendor channel, or public conference track. We operate under the Chatham House Rule so participants can share experiences, problems, and lessons learned without turning the room into a public case study or sales opportunity.
Every gathering is intentionally in person, creating the conditions for nuanced discussion, real trust, and relationships that continue beyond the room.
Community promise:
- 01 Conversations do not become public case studies
- 02 No sales presentations
- 03 Chatham House Rule Participants may use the ideas shared, but not reveal who said what or identify other people in the room.
- 04 Operator-to-operator conversations
Community formats
Two ways to join the conversation.
CTO Room Dinners
Small private dinners for technology leaders who want candid, operator-to-operator conversations in a trusted setting.
CTO Room Sessions
Invite-only sessions focused on practical implementations, hard-earned lessons, and real-world technology decisions. Led by technical leaders and operators directly responsible for the outcomes. No sales presentations.
Selected partners
Relevant expertise without turning the room into a channel.
CTO Room is supported by a small number of carefully selected partners who bring expertise that is genuinely useful to technology leaders.
This is not a lead-generation channel. Partner participation is curated, limited, and governed by the same community standards as everyone else.
Join the room
For technology leaders who want honest conversations with peers facing similar challenges.
Request an invite
The why
CTO Room was born from a simple observation: the most valuable conversations for people carrying real technology responsibility rarely happen in public.
I currently serve as CTO of Velocity and previously spent several years leading engineering at Ramp Network. Across fintech, SaaS, marketplaces, and hardware companies, I kept seeing the same pattern: hard decisions get better when you can compare notes with people facing similar tradeoffs.
Community building has been a recurring theme throughout my career. I co-founded Google Technology User Groups in Poland, later Google Developer Groups, helped launch one of Polandâs first hackerspaces, and organized dozens of conferences, barcamps, and hackathons.
- Ćukasz Anwajler