So first of all, what do you do at Trackingplan?
I’m the CTO of Trackingplan. Since we are a small team, I wear multiple hats throughout the day. So I act as developer, team lead, head of security and privacy, and I tend to focus on optimizing internal processes and technological adoption, which for some strange reason seem to be my passion. And I organize our team offsites. :-)
What’s a day in the life of Alexandros like? And outside of tech, what hobbies or passions fuel your creativity?
I’m a father of a 5- and 1-year old. So my days are mostly shaped around that. I work from my coworking space, from home, from the gym, and from café’s, where I actually feel most productive. My daily work can be explained mostly by unblocking others through technology. Be it solving a bug, a customer request or developing a new feature, I have been here from day one and there are some questions only few of us can answer confidently. Aside from work and my kids, I have been training Crossfit for a couple of years. It doesn't look like I'm getting any better, but it helps to relieve stress.
What motivated you and your co-founders to start Trackingplan? And what’s something about building a tech company that you didn’t anticipate when you launched Trackingplan?
We started Trackingplan during the COVID pandemic in March 2020. It was a way of intentionally picking with whom to work and of deciding ourselves what to work on, and especially, how to do it. The technological and human culture was always key to me. Being able to shape it was and stays the main motivation for me to be a founder.
I’d say that we didn’t anticipate any of it. A startup is a rollercoaster and this is my first one. You read tales from others, but living it in first-person is always different.
As someone who has worked at companies like Google and Rohde & Schwarz and in Academia, what aspects of Trackingplan’s culture or way of working do you find most rewarding?
I brought with me some vastly different experience of how things get done and I think that was useful. At least I had a clear opinion of what I was looking for and what worked for me and what didn’t in my previous workplaces. I believe that at Trackingplan one is able to disagree, have a voice and change things, and that is something very important for me. When I see that a coworker is able to express opinions or feelings, is respected for it and even able to make a changes, then I know we are on the right track.
Do you have a personal productivity ritual or a tool you can’t live without?
I do, but it won’t surprise anybody. I tend to do it too little, and I realize it when things get complex: Write things down. Writing has a power that speaking will never have. However, I had to learn that it’s only guaranteed to work for myself. When working with others, the only way to get them onboard is to use their preferred medium.
Who or what inspires you in the world of technology, and why?
People and technology that makes complexity look simple. Persons like Andrew Ng, my Machine Learning teacher and that of hundreds of thousands of others, or technologies such as Keras, a high-level and dead-simple abstraction of TensorFlow, the neural-networks graph library form Google, by François Chollet.
How do you see emerging technologies shaping the future of software development, and how do you envision these trends influencing Trackingplan specifically?
Well, we are in the midst of a total disruption. Software development is becoming a commodity accessible to anyone in the developed countries. There will be more Software than ever and programming will no longer be a craftmanship. However, I think that software engineering will still play a major role and maybe even grow in demand and complexity. Similarly Product design and technology-based business aren’t going anywhere. So this should make our market larger and automated quality control more impactful.
As a co-founder of Trackingplan, how do you envision the company evolving in the next few years, and what’s your guiding vision for its impact on the tech and analytics space?
I think that similar to software development, also Trackingplan will step up in terms of abstractions and be closer to product analytics, marketing and consent regulation instead of data types, campaigns and cookies.
It’s often said that developers have this nature of wanting to build everything by themselves. As a developer, what advice would you give to someone struggling with data quality who is thinking about building a solution from scratch?
I’d invite everyone to do it. Especially with LLMs, one should try it out. It will help them get an idea of what’s easy and what’s difficult and what you are really looking to solve with an observability platform like Trackingplan.
Actually, we were born this way, so I won’t discourage anyone from trying! :-)
Looking back, is there a challenge you overcame that taught you something you still apply today?
"Lose the battle, win the war”. Maybe not in these terms, but my PhD supervisor taught me not to despair when results weren’t achieved at first attempt but to keep trying, and more importantly, that human relationships are way more important than being right.
