Registration is now open for CppCon 2025! The conference starts on September 13 and will be held in person in Aurora, CO. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting some upcoming talks that you will be able to attend this year. Here’s another CppCon future talk we hope you will enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2025!

The Programmer CEO

Wednesday, September 17 16:45 - 17:45 MDT

by Greg Law

Summary of the talk:

Many programmers think about starting a company. It’s often not about getting rich so much as to pursue a vision for a computer program that is much bigger than one person could write alone. Like most programmers who start up, I had no formal training and little experience outside of software development. I was naively confident, and didn’t know what I didn’t know (it turned out that that was a LOT!)

The talk includes some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way, many of which were a complete surprise. I’ll cover getting investment, building the product, building a team, and getting and keeping customers. Little of this talk is directly about programming, but it is aimed at programmers who want to create code in order to create a business, or who want to create a business so that they can create the code they want.

Much of the content is also relevant for programmers who find themselves doing non-programming tasks, such as managing people or customer-facing roles, and anyone working at a start-up. Contains candid, warts-and-all war stories, and because it’s for programmers, comes with a no adverts and no business-talk BS guarantee.

Greg is co-founder and CEO at Undo. He is a programmer at heart, but likes to keep one foot in the software world and one in the business world. Greg finds it particularly rewarding to turn innovative software technology into a real business. Greg has over 25 years' experience in innovative start-up software companies.