Lars Klevan

If you’re a CEO/founder or PE operator and your tech org is: ❌ Shipping late ❌ Stuck in reactive mode ❌ Struggling through the Series A/B jump, or post-acquisition integration or after a major release It’s not “a delivery problem.” It’s an operating model problem. At the inflection point, the old playbook breaks: what worked at 10 engineers fails at 40… and breaks again across multiple products/teams. That’s where I come in as a fractional CTO: - Spot platform and delivery risks before they hit revenue and retention - Rebuild execution rituals (prioritization, ownership, release confidence) without derailing the roadmap - Align architecture + team structure to your value-creation plan (growth, margin, or exit timeline) If you’re feeling the strain of growth, I can help you turn “busy and reactive” into predictable shipping, and a platform that scales. #CTO #SaaS #StartupScale #PrivateEquity #TechStrategy

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Prompting alone doesn't cut it for credit agreement summaries. That's not a take. That's what we learned building Insight for Credit. When your customers are managing billions in assets, "good enough" isn't a standard. The CrediBulls team had to think carefully about structured retrieval, validation, and traceability. The R&D blog post on how we built this is worth a read. Link in comments.

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We don’t talk enough about this kind of leadership. Last week, forgecode shipped a feature that degraded response quality. Instead of hiding it, they: - Admitted the mistake publicly - Explained what went wrong - Fixed it promptly In the AI space, it’s easy to chase growth at all costs. But accountability is what builds real trust. The companies that own their mistakes and put customers first? They’re the ones that will win long-term. We need more of this energy in tech.

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When I was working in online video streaming, we were told we couldn't do CD because TV apps had to be certified by manufacturers. Yet we did CD. It helped us build enough trust so that some manufacturers allowed us to release most changes without certification, and others fast-tracked our certification process. When I was working on internal enterprise software, we were told we couldn't do CD because releases had to be planned and manually tested, deadlines respected, and users trained. Yet again, we did CD. Plans became high-level and abstract as iterative execution took over. Automated acceptance tests and feature flags allowed our QA testers to become our first users in production, rather than gatekeepers for releases. Training was built into the frontend applications. It may be the toughest challenge yet, but I'm determined to make it work in a business SaaS startup, where client demands and approvals are everything. The excuses are plentiful, but I have yet to see a domain where CD has failed to deliver results. After all, some of the most famous CD success stories are about printer firmware and an MMO game. Are you sure the software you are working on is more exotic than that?

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The hardest feedback I give isn’t about performance. It’s about impact. How something landed. What it caused downstream. Where confusion showed up. Those conversations are uncomfortable. I still rehearse them in my head. But every time I avoid one, the team pays for it later in smaller, quieter ways. I’m learning that saying the hard thing early is kinder than letting frustration accumulate.

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Honest question for fellow founders: How do you scale without losing quality? We're at 20 people. Every new hire feels risky. Every new client could hurt existing ones. Every process change might break what works. The transition from "small enough to control everything"  to "big enough to need systems" is terrifying. Currently trying: - Documenting everything in Notion - Weekly quality audits - Client feedback loops - Team happiness surveys Still feels fragile. Founders who've crossed 50 people - what worked? #Scaling #FounderChallenges #BusinessGrowth

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The Narrative Code Contemplating how our systems tell stories: Simple state models: "This is how things are now." Event sourcing: "This is how we got here." CQRS: "Different questions need different stories." The architecture you choose shapes the questions your business can ask about itself. #softwarearchitecture #ddd #coding

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I am glad folks at Cypress.io read my blog post "Pick E2E Tests To Run Using AI Summaries" and now are showing test summaries on dashboard. Next thing they will probably suggest tests to run. You can easily derive these text descriptions. https://lnkd.in/gUh2Srtm 

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Creating scripts might be worth it for things agents can't reliably do through prompting. I got this from an interview with Peter Steinberger (OpenClaw Founder) where he mentioned that CLIs work better for agents than MCPs. That stuck with me. If I can't get something to work through prompting, maybe I should just build a script the agent can call instead. Here's where it clicked for me. I tried getting my agent to watch our BugBot process in our CI and wait for it to finish. It takes about 10 minutes to run, but it's worth the wait. It catches really good bugs. The problem was that the agent just wouldn't reliably wait. It would either move on too early or stop checking altogether. So I created a script to do the watching. Now the agent just gets notified when it's done. Prompting is flexible. Scripts are reliable. Use both where they make sense.

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