Why we started CXO.dev

An overnight company, two years in the making

While we’re launching this company today, it feels like we started it almost two years ago.

See, two years ago we were both at LaunchDarkly. Claire was the new CPTO leading Engineering, Product, and Design, and Zach was the veteran long-time engineer leader rounding out a decade with the company.

Two years ago we both saw AI coming.

And we didn’t agree.

Claire (on brand) wanted to go hard and fast into the future. She had been a many-time founder, many-time CPTO (Color, Optimizely, LaunchDarkly), and knew a technology revolution when she saw one. She went all-in on AI, running a one-lady AI startup ChatPRD on the side, hosting the How I AI podcast, and pushed AI adoption aggressively in the team.

Zach was a bit more cautious. He spent nearly a decade each at Atlassian and LaunchDarkly, and more than twelve years in engineering leadership before returning to hands-on work as a principal engineer. He knew where the monolith would fight AI. He knew where the team would fight AI. He wasn’t quite so sure it would make them all move faster.

We both wanted the same thing: a happy team, moving faster, with great tools that helped us build awesome things for our customers. We just didn’t agree on exactly how AI was going to get us there.

So we decided to work together. Claire tapped Zach to lead the AI transformation across the 100+ engineers and 12 year old code base, and Zach bravely jumped in. He figured an informed AI skeptic was better than an uninformed one.

That was the start of our partnership, and that’s what brought us to starting this company.

As we worked together — refactoring the code base, running “AI Power Hour” Fridays, inviting Devin to the group chat, convincing engineers and finance and IT it would all be ok — we saw this work wasn’t simple, but it was worth it.

Zach quickly realized AI was getting bogged down in the same places humans were. Fixing things for agents meant improving the codebase for everyone.

And Claire realized it wasn’t enough to yell “AI” and unlock access to ChatGPT or Claude. Real progress was capped by the organization’s appetite for change (and the leaders that needed to drive that change.)

By late last year, the two of us had started narrowing in on a shared set of principles for successful AI transformation at companies like the ones we'd spent our careers in. We turned those principles into a two-day course for engineering, product, and design executives and were blown away by the response. Hundreds of companies were struggling with the same problems and searching for answers. The course finished, but the questions kept rolling in. Then the questions got bigger. And before we knew it, we had clients.

We didn't set out to start a business, we just kept saying yes until we had one.

CXO.dev is AI transformation for AI-pilled leaders

We help CEOs, CTOs, and CPOs push their teams by going deep on engineering, agent-first operating models, and reskilling, setting up the entire org (including its leaders) to ship faster with AI.

We don’t fancy ourselves consultants (though that’s a convenient term); we’re builders and technical leaders who want to get hands on with awesome teams to change how they write code, ship software, and run their teams.

How we can help

A lot of companies have put in the organizational elbow grease to get AI in the door: they bought licenses, got through security review, installed it on everyone's laptop, maybe even got some connectors approved.

And then they said: You have it now. Good luck. Let us know when you’ve shipped 10x as much.

Of course that's not how change works. Transformation doesn't happen when you buy the tools. It happens when you reimagine how work gets done and where to invest effort based on what those tools make possible. A company full of individuals on their own private AI journey won't get you there.

Transformation takes real leadership, to give people permission to work in completely new ways, to set up systems to bring everyone along, and to fan the flames of bottom-up momentum.

We know because we've done it. Here’s when we can help:

You bought tools; now everyone’s on their own

Purchasing tools is one kind of investment, but it's not enough for real change. We talk to so many leaders who say AI enablement is a top priority but shift nervously in their seats when you ask what they're willing to deprioritize to get there. Actual headcount. Actual roadmap time. Time, space, and training to learn the new hard skills at an advanced level and rethink how everyone’s job gets done.

The top of your token leaderboard is lonely

One person going faster is indistinguishable from noise in the system. Even a small group of highly motivated, high-agency individuals can only do so much. Organizational change requires organizational buy-in, and that comes from the top. Investment, systems, expectations, permission: these come from execs, not ICs.

You’re operating mostly the same way (just faster + with more slop)

Everyone doing work faster in a slow system still produces slow results. If a company's planning, execution, and go-to-market processes haven't changed at all, it doesn't matter how fast they can create PRDs, specs, code, documentation, or blog posts. Their customers are still getting features at the same rate, dictated by the old way of doing things.

Your codebase is fighting your agents

There are a lot of things that can make your codebase easier or harder to work in. Most of those things haven’t changed with AI, they’ve just gotten more important. All of the big and small things that caused friction for your engineers before now cause friction at scale, as dozens or even hundreds of agents get freshly onboarded to your repo every day.

If any of this hits close to home, we have good news and bad news. The good news is that you're not as far behind as you think. Nobody has this fully figured out, including the loud ones. The bad news is that catching up takes real work. We can help get you there faster.

We named the business CXO.dev partly because we're dorks who wanted a short, geeky url. But we chose that short, geeky url because we believe real transformation doesn't happen without the C-suite. If your C-whatever-O isn't modeling the behavior, carving out time for the team, and shifting priorities, you get individual wins that don't compound. We haven't seen this work without full-throated leadership buy-in.

When we talked about doing this together, our list of non-negotiables was short:

1. Work with people we like (each other, obviously.)
2. Build interesting things.
3. Have a lot of fun.

So far we're getting all three, plus clients we genuinely like and problems we can’t stop thinking about. The work is both thrilling and frustrating, often in the same afternoon. And if we're being honest, we can't really help ourselves.

If any of this sounds familiar, or you just want to chat: drop us a line.