Waskar Paulino
CTO & Co-Founder, Ideate | DJ | First-Gen AfroLatinx Technologist
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Actions
Waskar Paulino is the CTO and co-founder of Ideate, an AI-enhanced creative workspace for design teams. He's a first-generation AfroLatinx technologist, DJ, multidisciplinary artist, and founder of Philacon Valley, a creative tech community in Philadelphia. He previously spoke at PhillyJS about building real-time audio visualizers with JavaScript and a Pioneer DDJ-REV1. He writes about the real learning curve of being a first-time technical founder on his Substack. When he's not writing Convex actions, he's DJing with aPioneer DDJ-REV1.
Area of Expertise
Topics
The Wrong Number: What Happens When Your CTO Guesses Confidently
I told my team our AI pipeline processed images in "batches of 50." The real number was 5. They built a sprint plan around my wrong answer, and nobody questioned it because I said it with confidence.
This talk is about what happens when technical founders optimize for sounding certain instead of being accurate. I'll share the specific moments where my unverified claims shaped real product decisions, the codebase audit I ran that same day to fact-check myself, and the pre-meeting system I now use before every architecture discussion.
You'll walk away with:
- A framework for calibrating technical confidence at the earliest startup stage
- A pre-meeting checklist you can use Monday morning
- Permission to say "let me verify that" and proof that it builds more trust than having all the answers
This talk is for first-time CTOs, tech leads, and anyone who's ever guessed a number in a meeting. I told my team our AI pipeline processed images in "batches of 50." The real number was 5. They built a sprint plan around my wrong answer, and nobody questioned it — because I said it with confidence.
This talk is about what happens when technical founders optimize for sounding certain instead of being accurate. I'll share the specific moments where my unverified claims shaped real product decisions, the codebase audit I ran that same day to fact-check myself, and the pre-meeting system I now use before every architecture discussion.
You'll walk away with:
- A framework for calibrating technical confidence at the earliest startup stage
- A pre-meeting checklist you can use Monday morning
- Permission to say "let me verify that" —and proof that it builds more trust than having all the answers
This talk is for first-time CTOs, tech leads, and anyone who's ever guessed a number in a meeting.
Adaptable to 5, 15, 20, 30, or 45-minute slots. Previously developed from real experiences at Ideate, an AI-powered creative workspace. First public delivery pending. Target audience: engineering leaders, startup founders, tech leads.
Code as a Canvas: What DJing Taught Me About Building Software
Before I was a CTO, I was a DJ. Before I was a DJ, I was burning CDs for my friends. Before that, I was a kid drawing on everything.
This talk is about what happens when you stop treating your creative life and your engineering career as separate things. I'll walk through five specific skills I learned from DJing and making art that directly shaped how I build software and lead a technical team from reading a room (user research) to mixing live (production debugging) to knowing when the crowd is done with a track (feature deprecation).
You'll hear real stories from the DJ booth and the deploy terminal, and walk away with a framework for finding the engineering lessons hiding in whatever weird creative thing you do on the side.
This talk is for anyone who's ever felt like their non-technical passions don't belong on their resume.
Adaptable to 5, 15, 20, 30, 45, or 90-minute (workshop) formats. Includes optional live DJ hardware demo with Pioneer DDJ-REV1.
Previously spoke at PhillyJS on real-time audio visualization. Target audience: developers, creative technologists, anyone with non-traditional paths into tech.
Please note that Sessionize is not responsible for the accuracy or validity of the data provided by speakers. If you suspect this profile to be fake or spam, please let us know.
Jump to top