About this episode

Tommy Sullivan discusses building a world-class engineering culture at Vidio, Indonesia's largest streaming platform, focusing on hiring practices and the impact of AI.

What does it take to build a world-class engineering culture when you start with five engineers on minimum wage? Tommy Sullivan did exactly that at Vidio — and the team’s average tenure of seven years tells you everything about whether it worked. In this episode, Tommy Sullivan, CTO of Vidio (Indonesia’s largest streaming platform) shares how he built an engineering culture from almost nothing, growing a team of five to over two hundred using Extreme Programming principles and a relentless focus on hiring for attitude over aptitude. Tommy traces his journey from Pivotal Labs in San Francisco to the early days of Indonesia’s tech boom, explaining why Vidio survived when well-funded competitors like Hooq and iFlix all shut down. Along the way, he gets into where AI has worked and where it has failed at Vidio, how the team is rethinking pair programming in the age of AI agents, what it takes to stream four terabytes per second during live events, and why protecting code quality is ultimately a culture problem, not a tooling one. Tommy also shares a hard-earned view on the agentic AI trend and why understanding the underlying mechanics matters more than chasing the hype. Key topics…

People in this episode

Host: Henry Suryawirawan

Guest: Tommy Sullivan

Topics covered

• Engineering culture
• Extreme Programming
• Hiring practices
• AI in technology
• Streaming technology
• Code quality

Keywords

• engineering culture
• Extreme Programming
• AI
• streaming
• code quality
• hiring for attitude
• pair programming

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Vidio, Pivotal Labs, Hooq, iFlix

Places: Indonesia, San Francisco

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