I built an engineering organization from zero to 200+ people in Athens and helped grow the company to 700 worldwide. This hub collects what I learned — and how AI is rewriting the playbook for teams, CTOs, and the craft itself.
Start with the first list for the AI-era view of teams, then use the CTO playbook and the 5 → 700 story for the practical, from-the-trenches lessons on hiring, culture and scaling.
Start with these
- The 20x Team Manifesto — small, elite, AI-powered teams that outperform organizations ten times their size.
- Building Software with the Rule of Two — two humans plus an agent swarm.
- The Agent-Human OS — the org design layer of AI adoption.
- Balancing AI Tools and Human Talent — hiring and growing engineers in the AI era.
The CTO playbook
- The Role of a CTO in a Fast-Growing Startup · The Role of a CDO · CTO vs CDO
- The Engineering Hierarchy — career paths from tech lead to VP of Engineering.
- Fostering Psychological Safety — the #1 factor in team performance, made practical.
- Writing Code While Being a Manager · Why M&A and Not Just Hiring
The 5 → 700 story
- A Journey Begins: The Early Days · Engineering Culture at a Fast-Growing Startup · Embarking on a QA Quest
- How a Music Streaming Startup Used Varnish Cache — an early scaling war story.
- The Evolution of Greece’s Tech Ecosystem — what building it taught the ecosystem.
Latest on engineering leadership
- The Three-Body Problem Has One Force. Your Team Has Six. — why Conway’s law copies your team’s tangle into your architecture.
- The Great Tech Reset — why AI removes busywork, not craftsmanship.
- The Potential and Pitfalls of Vibe Coding — what prompt-first building means for engineering teams.
- Why I Built an AI “Bad Cop” — lessons from building an AI tech-stack auditor solo.
- The Revolutions I Lived Through — twenty years of technology handing small teams leverage.
The bigger picture
Leadership is stewardship of what teams aim at. My answer to “aim at what?” is The APILama Tech Manifesto: build technology that looks up, not down.
Related hubs: AI Strategy · The Agentic Web & MCP