Scaling Without Breaking: CXO Insights on Product Engineering Growth
Speed is mandatory in startups—but speed without foundations is how systems, teams, and culture eventually break.
Scaling Without Breaking: CXO Insights on Product Engineering Growth is a fireside chat focused on how fast-growing companies can scale product and engineering organizations without sacrificing long-term resilience. We’ll challenge popular startup mantras like “ship it,” “done is better than perfect,” and “we’ll fix it later as tech debt”—not to dismiss them, but to put them in the right context.
The key insight: strong foundations don’t require heavyweight process or perfection. With the right early decisions, startups can move fast and build systems, teams, and practices that scale smoothly instead of collapsing under growth.
This session will explore three core principles that enable sustainable scaling:
1. Foundational engineering practices that support speed instead of slowing it down
2. Pragmatic coding standards and delivery processes that prevent chaos as complexity grows
3. A strong talent acquisition and growth pipeline that scales teams without diluting culture or quality
Expect real-world examples, tradeoffs, and lessons learned from scaling startups across multiple stages. This is a practical, honest conversation for founders, CTOs, and engineering leaders who want to grow fast—without breaking what they’re building.
Virtual, casual, and worth your lunch break.
Fireside Chat:
Moderator: Abhishek Chowdhury, CEO, Infinite Build, ex-Apple engineer
About Abhishek Chowdhury: Abhishek Chowdhury is a technology leader with experience across early-stage companies and senior roles in Silicon Valley. He helped build an asset management system that informs product selection on Apple.com and has since led the delivery of complex, production systems for multiple organizations. Through Infinite Build, Abhishek works with founders, CTOs, and engineering leaders to design durable software development lifecycles and operating models, while co-creating a multi-platform infrastructure that enables remote regulatory coordination designed to support individual and systemic health, economic participation, and long-term autonomy.
CTO - Omar Aguirre, 3X CTO, ex-YC
About Omar Aguirre: Omar Aguirre is an execution-driven technology leader and hands-on engineer with a PhD and over 15 years of experience building and scaling complex, API-driven and AI-powered platforms. He is currently Head of Engineering at SimmerDate, an AI-powered dating platform reimagining how human connection begins through intelligent simulation.
Previously, Omar served as CTO at ShoppingGives, Head of Engineering at Audiobyte (Songclip), and CTO/Co-Founder at multiple startups. He was also Co-Founder and VP of Engineering at OPTENET, a global cloud security provider for telecom operators with over 100 million users, later acquired by Allot Communications (NASDAQ: ALLT).
Across his career, Omar has built and led globally distributed engineering teams, scaling products from MVP to millions of users while balancing speed, quality, and culture.
Sponsor:
TechLAB Innovation Center (techlabcenter.com) mission is to help early and mid-stage technology entrepreneurs with a developed product/service, scale up business operations to achieve sustainable growth.
Sara Rauchwerger is the Founder and Managing Director of TechLAB Innovation Center, leading strategy, partnerships, and ecosystem growth. She drives the vision behind building companies from early traction to market leadership.
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sara-rauchwerger-founder-techlab-innovation-center-5a430
Manish Kasliwal is Managing Director of Talent and Process Innovation at TechLAB Innovation Center. He leads scalable talent frameworks and operational innovation that prepare companies for rapid growth and execution excellence.
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/manishkasliwal