Steve Thompson

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT STEVE THOMPSON

I use my experience as a CTO to provide technical leadership and to empower investors. I thrive on transforming software vision into a coherent and deliverable strategy. I have an innate ability for translating a rich, technical vision into straightforward language. Having led and scaled technical teams I provide insight on the challenges of strengthening a technical team and how to overcome them.I am a creative board-level thinker; providing thought-leadership and multi-year, organisation-wide strategies. I work across all stakeholders (technical and non-technical) to make, and be accountable for, considered decisions based on imperfect information. I am a leader with 15+ years’ experience of growing high-performing, motivated teams and promoting communication between them. When I joined Airbox Systems, the initial development team consisted of 4 excellent individual contributors. In order to deliver on the multi-year strategy, this needed to grow sustainably by at least 10x without compromising our existing high-performance culture. I enacted an “up and out” scaling model: By coaching and mentoring existing members of staff I steered a cultural shift from individual excellence to cohesive teamwork. Concurrently, I developed a nuanced recruitment strategy to incorporate QA and Devops functions to establish multiple cross-functional teams. The processes and practices promoted communication between teams and individuals resulting in a department of 35 with scope to grow a further 5x, retaining a 95% staff retention rate.A cyber security startup engaged my services to develop a technical strategy that would drive the organisation forwards with an eye on a future exit. I worked with technical and non-technical stakeholders to understand the product, and the technology that underpinned it. My research also identified similar products within the market and identified differentiating characteristics. I communicated this back to the management team, identifying product development opportunities that would increase the attractiveness of the organisation for acquisition.