The 14th CTO Colloquium: Denver, CO
The 14th CTO Colloquium: Strengthen Your Foundations
A two-day catalyst event
Dates: September 18–19, 2025
Venue for Both Days: Code Talent, located in River North
Address: 3412 Blake St, Denver, CO 80205
Great leadership begins with strong foundations.
The 14th CTO Colloquium is a two-day experience for CTOs who are ready to reinforce sustainable growth through clarity, consistency, and intentional leadership.
At the core of this event is the official launch of LIQUID: How CEOs & CTOs Unlock Flow and Momentum in Complex Systems, a new book by Etienne de Bruin, Kathy Keating, and Scott Graves. LIQUID introduces the CTO Sentinel, the foundation behind the CTO Levels framework, a powerful model to help technical leaders align with reality, assess their impact, and move forward with purpose.
The Talks
Talk 1: The CTO Identity: How Your Leadership Shapes Every System (Kathy Keating)
This session dives deep into the often-overlooked truth: your leadership identity sets the tone for every system, team, and product you touch.
We will cover:
The importance of consistency in our industry.
Why we should stop resolving solved problems.
How our brand of leadership shapes everything we build and scale.
Talk 2: Strong Foundations Drive Success (Etienne de Bruin)
We unpack what assessments, such as the CTO Levels framework, reveal about your organization’s true foundation and why so many teams hit a ceiling not because of a lack of vision, but because of misalignment below the surface.
We’ll address:
What assessments reveal about a company's grounding.
Why strong foundations are essential to growth and revenue.
How the CTO Levels framework is being used to drive strategy and profitability.
Talk 3: Engineering in the Age of Non-Determinism: Lessons from R&D Leaders (Diana Pfeil)
Engineering used to be deterministic: define the problem, design the system, execute the roadmap. But the rise of AI and LLM-native development has upended this paradigm. Increasingly, the work our teams do is non-deterministic, and marked by uncertainty and feasibility risks. Today’s CTOs can no longer rely solely on classic execution frameworks. Instead, they must learn to lead like R&D heads: creating space for exploration, placing small bets to de-risk big bets, and evolving roadmaps based on learning, not just planning. In this talk, we’ll dive into the processes, tooling, and mindsets needed to navigate and lead AI-native engineering teams.
The Agenda
Day 1 September 18
Code Talent (3412 Blake Street, Denver, CO, USA)
3:00 – 3:30 Opening remarks
3:30 – 4:15 The CTO Identity: How Your Leadership Shapes Every System (@Kathy Keating)
4:15 – 5:00 Strong Foundations Drive Success (@et Etienne de Bruin)
5:00 – 5:30 Break
5:30 – 6:15 Engineering in the Age of Non-Determinism: Lessons from R&D Leaders (@Diana Pfeil)
6:15 – 6:30 Debrief
7:00 PM Optional: join us for Happy Hour at BrewDog (Meals and drinks available for individual purchase — separate checks are no problem)
Day 2 September 19
Code Talent (3412 Blake Street, Denver, CO, USA)
8:30 AM - 12:30 PM Small Group Sessions
1:00 - 2:30 PM Lunch in Denver at Improper City (There will be two food trucks to grab a bite to eat from: Street Side Eats and It's All Greek to Me) (Meals and drinks available for individual purchase)
2:30 PM - 5:00 PM Mini golf at Putt Shack with dessert, mini golf and a drink on 7CTOs and our sponsor, JDAQA
Registration
Standard: $249