Earlier this month, I keynoted at StartCon in Sydney, to an estimated 1,000 people on the technical track. It was the biggest and most personal talk that I’ve ever given.

In the talk, I shared stories and lessons — some that I had never opened up publicly about before, even to friends and co-workers — about what it really meant to be an effective engineer. The conference organizers graciously made a video of my talk available, and I’m thrilled to share it with you today.

Preparing for the talk wasn’t easy. The lead-up involved long days of story crafting and practice; multiple dry runs with co-workers at Quip; a morning meditation session to calm my nerves the day of; and non-stop cough drops to survive a nerve-racking sore throat that emerged the morning of the talk.

Thankfully, all that work paid off. I’m incredibly proud of the positive reception afterwards.

“Edmond Lau gave a great talk today at StartCon 2017. Best takeaway was the importance of balancing operational effectiveness with team communication.”
— Henry George, CTO

“Looking back over StartCon.com, I must say Edmond Lau’s talk really related to me! Recently I’ve been putting in a lot of hours in and in some cases the efforts aren’t always proportional to the results. Edmond’s framework for leveraging high level actions really was helpful! And it immediately clicked for me. Definitely one of the best talks I’ve seen. Thank you!”
— Mathew Burns, Lead Developer

If you follow my work, part of the talk may seem familiar.

In the first part of the 25-minute keynote, you’ll learn the key framework that effective engineers use to determine how to spend their time — a framework that took me years of working 70-80 hour weeks to figure out. And you’ll get inside access into stories and lessons from engineering leaders at Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Stripe, Quora, and more, around the most valuable lessons they’ve learned and the investments they’ve made with the highest returns.

In the second part of the talk, you’ll hear new stories and lessons that I’m sharing for the first time — drawn from my experiences in the past year coaching upwards of 50 people ranging from tech leads and managers to directors and CTOs. You’ll walk away with the most valuable and hard-earned lessons I’ve internalized on how to become a great engineering leader and build effective engineering teams.

Enjoy!

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