When Justin Dean was placed as a network engineer in the Marine Corps, he had no idea that this would lead to a career helping legacy and emerging businesses shape what is possible in network engineering. Justin is currently the CTO and CIO of Weedmaps, a website that helps customers find local weed dispensaries and helps dispensaries stay in compliance with state regulations.

Today, Justin takes us through his jobs at Shopzilla and Ticketmaster before arriving at the industry changing Weedmaps. Listen in as he talks to Peter about both the evolution and future of network engineering.

• (01:10) - The road to Weedmaps
• (08:37) - The secret sauce at Shopzilla
• (15:10) - Transforming Ticketmaster
• (25:49) - The World Wide Web of Weed
• (34:30) - Product prioritization
• (36:10) - Business unit organization
• (46:52) - Attracting and hiring staff

Special thanks to our global partner – Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS offers a broad set of global cloud-based products to equip technology leaders to build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to [email protected] if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.

CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!

If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.

Podcast episode production by Dante32.