Lunch with Rands
We're delighted to host Michael Lopp, better known to a generation of engineering leaders as Rands, for a lunchtime roundtable in Baseline.
Michael has been writing about software teams since 2002. His blog Rands in Repose, his books Managing Humans, Being Geek, and The Art of Leadership, and the Rands Leadership Slack (now reaching nearly 40,000 engineering leaders worldwide!) have shaped how a generation of founders, leaders and managers think about their craft.
The themes he returns to: how to give feedback people can actually hear, when to delegate and when to step in, how to read the humans on your team, how to build cultures that ship, and the quiet discipline of small things done well, daily.
His operating CV reads like a tour of Silicon Valley over the past 30+ years:
Engineer at Symantec and Borland in the late 80s and early 90s, legendary software companies both
Engineering Manager at Netscape during the original browser wars, literally inventing the foundation of the web
Director of Engineering at Icarian through the dot-com boom and bust
Eight years as Senior Engineering Manager at Apple — Mac OS Server, then building out the Apple Store engineering team for iOS
Director at Palantir as it scaled from 200 to 1,500 people
Head of Engineering at Pinterest, reporting to the CEO, through its IPO
First VP of Engineering at Slack — hired to build what at the time was the team behind the fastest-growing enterprise software company in history
Most recently Senior Director of Engineering back at Apple, leading the teams behind Messages, FaceTime, Mail, and Contacts
This is a roundtable over lunch, so expect a small group of technical founders at different stages of growth, an off-the-record conversation, and the chance to ask Lopp whatever you've been chewing on: making your first engineering hires, scaling from 10 to 100, what hyper-growth actually feels like from the inside, when to get out of the way and when to draw a line in the sand, and how the engineering leader's role is shifting in the age of Claude Code and agentic tooling.
Lunch will be served. Numbers are very limited, apply to join.