A dynamic team of seasoned tech leaders and visionary educators dedicated to shaping the future of technology leadership.
Founders and Lecturers
Andrew Weaver
CEO, Lecturer, Coach
20+ years of executive level commercial experience in SME and early stage companies across multiple sectors inc. law, tech, travel, leisure and property.
Particular expertise around strategy, sales, funding/finance, M&A, mindset.
Course leader/mentor at London based start up accelerator.
Cranfield MBA.
Jason Noble
CTO, Lecturer, Coach
Tech entrepreneur with extensive board level IT innovation and computer science experience. Has been technical director of software businesses and managed large, complex enterprise projects with successful exits.
Career has been defined driving innovation, strategic & operational planning, training, technical sales and software agile project management.
The Core Team
Dr Hannah Forbes
Senior Business Development
Hannah's focus is to help us expand our presence into our key markets with new business development initiatives and where we can add value.
Often seen playing football and supporting her local football team, Gillingham. Based in London, UK (when not traveling)
Martyn Knight
CFO
Martyn is an accomplished CFO/FD with a depth of valuable experience across corporate finance, corporate governance, funding, due diligence, restructuring, treasury, compliance and investor functions.
Based in London, UK
Réka György
Course Designer
Reka brings science to our course development process. An instructional designer and L&D specialist, she has worked with major corporations and smaller startups to ensure they/we are following best practice in how to get the most from your eLearning experience. Based in Cluj, Romania.
Natalia Welner
Customer Services Lead
Nati heads up our customer service team. If you’ve been a CTO Academy member for any length of time, then you will be familiar with Nati reaching out to say hello … it’s a central pillar of our approach to helping every member extract the most value from this learning experience.
Based in Argentina
Marco Zimmerman
Operations Manager
Marco helps oil the wheels of the company by looking after marketing ops, data and product release.
He is the first point of contact when an improvement is requested on our platforms.
Based in Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil.
Betina Zanchin
Senior Platform Engineer
Betina makes our tech work.
She is responsible for the development of our main platform which is updated on a weekly basis.
With automation being her superpower, she automates all of our menial tasks.
Based in Brazil.
Igor Katusic
Content & Website Manager
If you found us on the web, then it was probably Igor that made that happen.
He looks after our content and newsletter as well as strong opinions on SEO and messaging.
Based in Croatia
Global Faculty
All of our lecturers remain in hands on, senior leadership roles which means that they're able to deliver highly relevant and practical lectures, often with immediately actionable insight for you to take straight into your current role.
Julian Costley
Entrepreneur, Investor, LBS Mentor
Serial investor in 26 companies with a career of executive roles at Thomson Reuters, France Telecom, BSkyB and exited E*TRADE in 2001. Mentor at London Business Model and recently purchased his own publishing company.
Lucy-Rose Walker
Entrepreneur, Business Coach, Author
Co-founded and exited business support company in the UK in 2012. Has since authored "Misadventures in Entrepreneuring" and is now focused on coaching startup founders, lecturing and senior role in the Bitcoin Collective.
Vyom Uphadya
CTO, CIO, CDO, Executive Director
Vast executive experience across multiple sectors developing top-tier talent, maturing processes, and advancing technologies. Also plays a leading role within the South Florida Tech Hub.
Jim Mortensen
Fractional CTO, COO and Leadership Coach
Technical leader with extensive business achievements over a wide range of domains, and particular expertise in technical due diligence, strategic planning, data security, and the payment card industry. Also coaches senior technology leaders from around the world.
Santiago Garcia da Rosa
CTO, Co-Founder; Y Combinator Alumni
Hands on CTO at Nowports, a South American Unicorn in the logistics space. Also a regular contributor to publications on technology, leadership and entrepreneurship.
Gus Power
VP of Architecture and Engineering
Vast experience across multiple sectors and from enterprise to startup. Described as being “People-friendly techie” with a knowledge of the dynamics behind software development as simply extraordinary. In his words ... "The solution doesn't have to be as big as the problem"
Mita Patel
CTO, Co-Founder, Coach and Fmr Head of Product
20 years of deep experience across Business Acquisition, Product Leadership, Software Development and Account Management. "I use lean methodologies to validate, build and commercialise real problems worth solving for users and customers"
Staffan Noteberg
Best Selling Author of "Pomodoro Technique"
Staffan focuses his writing and lecturing around personal productivity and answering the question, “How can we complete things when we have so many tasks to do?”. Well, you won’t get more done just because you accept more requests—rather, it’s the other way around.
Luca Rossi
CTO, Head of Engineering and Founder of Refactoring Newsletter
An entrepreneur who loves leading engineers on great products. Formerly a CTO, Co-Founder and Head of Engineering, now creator and founder of the growing Refactoring Newsletter for Engineering Managers.
Jof Walters
Entrepreneur, No-Code and Fintech Pioneer
25 years focused on the creation of new financial products and services. Has led new product development, innovation and banking teams, launching and existing two fintech companies. Now co-founder of Million Labs in the UK with focus on use of no-code technology.
Andrew Bryant
Best Selling Author, Keynote Speaker and Executive Coach
World leading expert on Self Leadership and author of multiple best selling books on and around the topic. Andrew also travels the world as a keynote speaker and executive leadership coach to major corporates.
Hariharan Gopalan
CTO and Meditation Instructor
Diversified IT experience in small and large-scale information systems for private and government clients. Now a CTO based in the US but also brings to CTO Academy his insight and knowledge as a Meditation Instructor.
Caleb Storkey
Entrepreneur, Keynote Speaker, Author
Serial entrepreneur, international speaker, author and consultant, Caleb has worked with a wide range of businesses, from multinationals to highly disruptive and rapid growth startups. He is also co-author of Futureproof - How To Get Your Business Ready For The Next Disruption.
Joseph Trodden
CEO, Co-Founder, Coach
With a focus on practical mindset and strategy techniques for leaders, Joseph coaches teams on focus, decision making, team culture, mindsets and communication with an emphasis on combining the different cognitive styles on the team together.
Lauren Hill
Security Consultant Barclays
With a 1st class BSc in Cyber Security, Lauren is focused on being able to concisely share the real threat landscape with tools like threat mapping and trend analysis.
Mike Stephens
CEO, Head of Entrepreneurial Academy
Describes himself "As a restless idea-hunter, with a deeply held belief in the power of creativity and curiosity to change the world, hence my love of working with entrepreneurs. I love to see the limitless possibilities in people and businesses". Currently CEO at major business support organisation in the UK.
Tim Dahlstrom
COO
Passionate about the potential of No-Code technologies, whilst from the US Tim is currently working as the COO of Zeroqode, a no-code web development agency, and located in Moldova.
Zoe Tuffs
Coach, Mentor, Speaker
After 20 years working in live events and leading teams in corporate organisations such as Google, Toyota, BMW, and Samsung. Zoe has taken that experience into a coaching and career development practice.
Samer Bechara
CTO, Mentor
With many years of experience managing technical teams and delivering projects, Samer has worked with startups to companies with tens of millions in revenue. He is a skilled manager of cross border teams.
April Edwards
Senior Cloud Advocate, Microsoft
April is a senior cloud developer advocate and the DevOps practice lead at Microsoft, specializing in application transformation. Her focus is working on Microsoft Azure to take customers of a journey from legacy technology, to serverless and containers, where code comes first.
Tim Plumridge
Head of IT
Experienced Head of Information Technology with a history of working in the international trade and development industry and a background in business. Main focus on IT Transformation, Strategy, Management, Information Security.
Anna Ashford
Lawyer, Investment Director, Board Advisor
Anna is an unusual lawyer in that she gets business, because she's also a director, investor and founder of ALT-Legal in the UK. This means her lectures are focused on the practical and necessary role that law plays in the business life cycle, wherever you are in the world.
Samuel Rowe
Senior Customer Success Architect, GitHub
Works with customers to succeed in their business objectives through the use of GitHub and is passionate about technological evolution, improvement and programming languages
Sanjay Mistry
Group CTO, NED, Coach
Vast leadership experience across technology and operations, particularly around organisational transformation, scaling, system and process revolution, leading through change and disruption. Also an experienced coach working with tech leaders around the world.
Henry Fairpo
M&A Advisor, Strategic Consultant, Investor
During recent years Henry has beenn involved in 2 international exits, an LBO, a major fund raise and was part of an award winning team at the British Private Equity Awards. He understands the M&A market and how to structure deals between competing stakeholders.
Charles Pugh
Platform Lead
Senior Tech Leader with 20+ years working with ASOS, Amazon, Microsoft and Nokia. Particular insight around driving the design and delivery of applications across digital platforms and has led the development of the UK’s highest volume consumer websites.
Trevor Lea-Cox
Director and Former Group CIO
Direct experience with large Transportation, Logistics and Financial Services conglomerate. Also as Managing Director. of UK based SME. He now specialises in Information, Systems and Technology (I,S&T) management consulting across different industries.
Neil Macleod
CEO, CFO, MD of Multinational and Professor of Business
Neil brings to his lectures a wide range of experience in senior executive positions within global companies from Australia to Luxembourg, USA to Malaysia. He is now an Honorary Professor at the University of Dundee Business School.
Alastair Hall
UK Country Manager at Innovation Consultancy
He has developed a deep understanding of R&D tax and global grant funding opportunities which in his words ... "with some creative thinking it can be an essential business intelligence tool to help run your business or improve KPI's"
Sonabh Bubna
Accountant and Strategic Advisor
A qualified accountant and founder of a strategic CFO consultancy, Sonabh works with companies around the world to help them streamline their finance function.
James Sinclair
Data Visualisation Principal
Data scientist, distributed-computation and machine-learning engineer with experience across a broad range of industries and applications.
Kate Rowland
Senior Tax Manager, EY
With experience at many of the leading accountancy firms, Kate is now a senior tax manager at EY dealing with national and international tax issues for client companies.
Tiffany Vaughan
Senior Tax Manager, EY
Qualified accountant who for 6 years has been working at EY in London, recently promoted to Senior Tax Manager after 6 years focused on Indirect Tax for companies with a global perspective.
André Louçã
CEO, CTO, Head of Data Science
With a deep knowledge of data and analytics, Andre was recently promoted to CEO, after 6 years in the CTO role and before that as Head of Data Science.
Rafa Prada
Head of Design and Lecturer at London College of Communication
Senior product design consultant, industry mentor and lecturer whose work lies in the intersection of YX, Business and Technology, specialising in digital products with emphasis on collaboration practices and privacy.
Kraig Appleton
Director of Data Science
Data scientist, distributed-computation and machine-learning engineer with experience across a broad range of industries and applications.
Paul Bayliss
Joint Managing Director and CTO at Smartodds
Joint Managing Director and CTO at Smartodds
John Brightwell
Director at WaveAccess
With 35 years at the helm of technology as a CEO and CTO, he has been at the forefront of software innovation and development.
Sally Eaves
Emergent Technology CTO
Prof. Sally Eaves has been described as the ‘torchbearer for ethical tech’. She is an international advocate for opening access to opportunity and has founded Aspirational Futures to help skill, empower and support the generation of interdisciplinary talent into careers yet to be conceived, alongside scaling the application of emergent technology as an enabler for business transformation and social good.
Paul Gerrard
Eminent Software Consultant, Author, Teacher and Coach
An internationally renowned, award-winning software engineering consultant, author and coach. Host of the Technology Leadership Forum, Programme Chair of the 2014 EuroSTAR Testing conference, Programme Chair of the 2022 Hustef Testing conference, keynote speaker and thought-leader.
Michael Hausenblas
Product Manager, AWS
Open source product owner, delivering a distribution of OpenTelemetry and integrations with AWS compute environments. Contributing to upstream OpenTelemetry in End-User and Agent Management working groups.
Arno Hollosi
CTO @ blackshark.ai
Professor and Research Scientist as well as managing technology and development organization of Blackshark.ai's geospatial analysis platform.
Phil Kunovski
Chief Technology Officer at KYMIRA
Leader in R&D into new e-textile platforms for wearable technologies for sports, fitness and medical markets.
Matthew O'Keefe
Principal Technologist
Results-driven senior technologist with over 25 years of success in building and distributing great products.
Sergey Ponomarenko
IoT Expert
An IoT/IIoT & Telco expert with nearly 30 years of overall software development background, including 20 years of software development management.
Ian Price
Performance Psychologist & Author
A CEO-turned psychologist and author, Ian is an expert in building mental toughness in teams.
Ashwin Ram
Cyber Security Evangelist
Ashwin Ram is a seasoned cyber security expert and thought leader with an exceptional blend of executive consulting experience and technical savvy.
Alex Wilson
Investment Director at NVM Private Equity
Investment Director at NVM Private Equity
Lindsey Reed
Compliance Director and Consultant
Compliance practitioner and global director with deep insight and knowledge around areas of Training, Education, D&I and Culture
