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When I stood on the keynote stage at the London Tech Leaders Summit this week, I realized something — it was the first time in a long time I wasn’t talking about Kubernetes, containers, or infrastructure.
Instead, I was reflecting on something more personal: what it means to grow as a technologist, as a leader, and as a builder during a period of almost constant disruption.
In many ways, the story of my own career mirrors the evolution of Spectro Cloud. I’ve gone from writing code to leading nearly 300 people across engineering, product, and operations — and at the same time, Spectro Cloud has grown from a few people with an idea to a global company backed by $150 million in venture funding, trusted by some of the world’s largest enterprises. The lessons I’ve learned along the way — about scaling teams, embracing change, and using AI responsibly — are as much about leadership as they are about technology.
From startup chaos to strategic clarity
I spent the early days of my career at Cisco, before jumping into the deep end of startup life at a company called CliQr Technologies. There, I learned how to do everything: code, sell, support, demo — whatever it took. When Cisco later acquired CliQr, I saw firsthand how a small, innovative team could transform the way enterprises think about infrastructure.
That same belief, that we could make complex infrastructure simple and manageable, became the foundation for Spectro Cloud. When we launched in 2019, we were three founders with laptops, IKEA desks, and a vision for how Kubernetes should be managed at scale.
Fast forward to today: Spectro Cloud is a Series C company with nearly 300 employees. We’re helping Fortune 500 companies manage Kubernetes across every environment imaginable: public cloud, private cloud, data center, edge, and air-gapped deployments. But more importantly, we’ve built an organization that thrives on constant evolution.
As a CTO, I’ve learned that the journey from “doing everything” to “enabling everyone” is what defines sustainable leadership. Early on, I wrote the code myself. Today, my role is about empowering teams to move faster, innovate smarter, and align technology to strategy. I no longer measure my impact by commits, but by how effectively I multiply the impact of others.
Becoming a force multiplier
One of the earliest lessons I learned at Spectro Cloud was that growth changes everything. As we hired more people — from engineering to marketing, HR, and sales — my focus had to shift from execution to enablement.
We focused on building playbooks: not just for code or process, but for how teams could think, operate, and make decisions. We set measurable goals for every function, from code quality and security to customer satisfaction and sales enablement. Metrics weren’t just for dashboards; they were the guardrails that allowed us to scale without losing focus.
This shift turned me from a hands-on engineer into a force multiplier. My job is to create the systems, tools, and frameworks that allow others to do their best work. Whether it’s automating deployment pipelines or establishing repeatable processes for customer success, the impact compounds, and the company moves faster because of it.
Building with relentless focus
From the beginning, our vision for Spectro Cloud was ambitious: to build what we called a “world computer”, a unified fabric connecting applications and infrastructure across environments. It wasn’t something we could build overnight, but it is always there as our North Star.
We’ve methodically built towards this vision. First came infrastructure management for Kubernetes. Then came bare metal and edge support. Now, we’re extending that to application management — helping customers orchestrate containers, VMs, and even AI workloads on a common platform.
Each milestone built momentum for the next. Focus isn’t about doing less. It’s about doing the right things in the right order.
The AI awakening: turning chaos into capability
About two years ago, when ChatGPT first appeared, I did what every engineer does when faced with something new: I started tinkering. I spun up a quick Lambda function, tested its code generation, and immediately saw the potential, and the risk.
Very quickly, our teams at Spectro Cloud began experimenting too: developers using GitHub Copilot, support teams building AI triage bots, sales and marketing teams automating summaries and reports. It was exciting… but chaotic. Different teams were using different models, with varying levels of oversight. We needed structure.
So, we built a cross-functional AI task force. Not just engineers, but people from HR, sales, and marketing too. Their mission: to harness AI safely and strategically. They developed guidelines on model usage, data sharing, and security. We established what could and couldn’t be sent to cloud-hosted models, especially given our government contracts.
At the same time, we shifted from measuring productivity by lines of AI-generated code to tracking actual workflow transformation. How was AI changing how people worked, not just how fast they typed?
The impact has been profound. Our engineers now auto-generate unit tests with AI; support teams get instant ticket insights; sales reps receive real-time meeting summaries and next-step recommendations. And because knowledge now flows across our systems — from Jira to Slack to Salesforce — we can see reality as it happens.
Creating an organization that builds its own builders
The next step in our AI evolution has been enabling everyone at Spectro Cloud to become a builder. We’re now creating an internal framework that allows teams to create their own AI agents — small, domain-specific assistants that automate their unique workflows. A marketer can begin blog drafts with a prompt. A support engineer can automate response analysis. A finance team can surface insights without writing queries.
By making AI accessible across roles, we’re democratizing innovation. And that, I believe, is what the modern CTO’s job truly is: not to centralize genius, but to scale it.
Leading through disruption while staying grounded
Today, my role involves less code and more conversation with investors, customers, and partners about where technology is heading next. Increasingly, that’s at the intersection of infrastructure and AI.
Our customers, from healthcare innovators like RapidAI and Dentsply Sirona to agritech companies like Tevel, are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with Kubernetes at the edge. They’re deploying AI models in hospitals, dental clinics, and farms — environments where uptime, privacy, and scale aren’t optional.
That’s where I spend most of my time now: ensuring Spectro Cloud stays ahead of that curve. Building the systems that let innovation happen safely. Hiring the people who will make us better tomorrow than we are today. And reminding everyone that technology leadership isn’t about having all the answers — it’s about building the environment where answers can emerge.
Final thoughts: the evolving CTO
Technology will keep changing. AI will reshape everything from how we write code to how we think about creativity itself. But leadership, at its core, remains constant: clarity of vision, empathy for your people, and the courage to keep evolving.
At Spectro Cloud, that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re scaling fast, we’re hiring exceptional talent, and we’re not afraid to reinvent ourselves. Because evolution — of product, of people, of purpose — is the only real competitive advantage.
