Episode 7 | From Engineer to CTO: Building & Leading Through Crisis
Project Gamma14 Huhti 2025

Episode 7 | From Engineer to CTO: Building & Leading Through Crisis

Shawn Price’s journey from coding to leadership, scaling a SaaS startup, and navigating the challenges of COVID-19.

In this episode of Project Gamma, Warner Moore sits down with Shawn Price, Co-Founder & CTO at Healthy Roster, to talk about the real-life journey from corporate careers to startup leadership.

Together, they explore what it takes to pivot, survive, and grow a SaaS company in challenging times—including how Healthy Roster navigated the COVID-19 crisis when team sports came to a halt. Shawn shares his personal transition from being a full-stack engineer to leading a team as a CTO, the mindset shifts needed to move into leadership, and how to build the right product capabilities at the right time.


We also dive into:

  • Leaving corporate life for the startup grind

  • Identifying a market problem before building product

  • Managing spikey scale and scaling tech in SaaS

  • Transitioning from engineering to management without losing the technical edge

  • Solving the right problems without over-engineering

Books mentioned in this episode:

📚 The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz📚 Trillion Dollar Coach by Eric Schmidt📚 Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri

Tune in for an honest and insightful conversation on leadership, resilience, and building smarter tech companies.

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