Why I'm here, and what I'll be writing about

The times they are a-changin'

To say the working world has changed over the past year would be an understatement. I haven’t come here to hype or scaremonger - I’d much rather stick to the practical and pragmatic - but it’s not an exaggeration to say that as I write, the ground is quite literally moving beneath our feet. In the decade or so I’ve been at it, I’ve never seen or experienced anything quite like it.

The LinkedIn Lunatics will you the ‘playbook has changed’, with a few short. Snappy. Sentences. on what you can do about it. Perhaps that’s where I should be too, but hopefully here, my thoughts will come across not as they're intended - not as slop or clickbait but as honest and genuine.

Why does it matter what I think? That’s a valid question. The short answer is: it doesn’t. It matters what you think. That said, I have been in the game for a while, and have been fortunate enough to have had somewhat of a front seat for a lot of it.

Starting out, scaling up, moving on - and wearing many hats

I suppose for one, there aren’t many other co-founders of Too Good To Go, and there can’t be many growth stories like the early-stage Too Good To Go growth story. I built that from the very beginning, and have plenty of learnings to share from along the way - from getting started with absolutely nothing, to scaling up to teams of hundreds.

Then it was Futureplay - a completely different journey in a completely different country with a completely different culture. I was the first marketing hire there, and, while the transition was tough (it takes a lot to step away from your own startup) I like to think I had a small part to play to helping the company to a successful acquisition by Plarium.

From one ‘play’ to another - Futureplay to Metaplay - and another startup of just ten people, not making games, but the tech that powers them. And it’s at Metaplay I’ve felt most at-home since the Too Good To Go days - being able to draw upon all of my learnings from growing companies and games in both B2B and B2C to help us scale internationally and have a real and meaningful impact across the industry.

Along the way I’ve built teams, hired people, fired people, managed up, managed down, raised funding, chased grants, closed deals, lost deals, launched products, ran campaigns, and, as my old co-founder Jamie Crummie used to say, even been introduced on primetime UK TV by Jon Bon Jovi (I wish I still had the clip of him leading in a Too Good To Go segment on the One Show back in 2016). In short, my career over the years has involved all of the things that working in or leading a tech startup could entail, bar the actual tech development itself.

That was until this year, at least. Up to now, people like me have always relied on developers smarter than us to get something technical done. As a case in point, we spent three years running our website at Metaplay with a web development agency, and while the agency was great, I look back at that time and wonder how the hell we got by working that way for so long. Design briefs. Development briefs. Lead times. Development times. And at the end of it all, an invoice from the agency to boot. Sound familiar?

Freeing developers from the burdens of bizdev

This is where I get back to the ground shifting. A non-technical person used to have to rely on engineers for marketing and sales-related tech implementation and execution: building websites, managing CMS and CRM databases, building tailored outreach pipelines, and so on. But over the last year or so, the landscape has changed. And as a a non-technical person, if you're at a tech startup and you're not working on the codebase, then by elimination, you're probably working quite close to your customer. That uniquely positions you to take advantage of the opportunity in front of us now - if you can learn to manipulate the tools right.

A non-techie's 18-month AI journey

As a long-time Wordpress tinkerer, I threw myself into Lovable when it first launched in November 2024. I soon got helplessly addicted, built a plethora of hobby projects, and, slowly but surely, in the time from then to now, graduated from Lovable through to Cursor and, eventually, Claude Code.

This hardcore vibe-coding ramp has meant that while not being a coder, I’ve been able to pick up a lot of the thinking and mental models required to build the systems that allow marketing and commercial to build self-sufficient development systems, without having to rely on engineers who would much rather be working on bigger and more meaningful problems. I’m also lucky enough to work at the deepest end of deep tech - it doesn’t get much more complex than building massively scalable backends for games, and, daily, I marvel at the engineering skills of my peers at Metaplay, and just how far we are ahead of the curve on this whole AI thing.

Building end-to-end commercial systems with AI

Taking inspiration from my colleagues and applying it to our commercial function, since the start of 2026 alone, our tiny team of two has been able to punch way above our weight. We’ve moved to an AI-systems first way of operating. Importantly, this doesn’t mean removing humans entirely. We’ve built agents and bots to handle all the boring, manual, tedious background work that nobody wanted to do anyway. People are left do the things only people need and want to do: judgement, decision-making, and any human-facing content production (read: even though we could, we don’t have AI write our blogs, emails, newsletters and such. IMO, that’s how you lose an audience).

Basically, we’ve used AI to build and maintain the foundational systems we can then work on top of, and then the flywheels and pipelines that help us scale. In the long-run, this keeps a small commercial team focused on the most impactful things likely to move the needle without having to worry about painful things like CRM hygiene, data drift, keeping vital information in our head, and, generally, just cleaning up after ourselves.

Getting ahead of the paradigm shift

At the risk of re-entering the realms of the Linkedin Lunatic, we really are moving through a paradigm shift. In the next posts, I’ll share the practical steps on the workflow flywheel and data lakes we’ve built - the foundational building blocks that unlock the system.

If you’re just getting started on this journey, or thinking about doing so sometime soon, hopefully sharing the steps we’ve already taken will help you get ahead.