Building a company is like growing an orchard. In 2025, I spent less time chasing quick wins and more time setting foundations across people, customer success, and our product LARA. This is a reflection on the journey, the small decisions, and what it really takes to build something that lasts.
Building a company is really hard and it often involves many different topics and actions.
- Building culture
- Hiring new talent
- Finding new customers
- Keeping existing customers
- Building your brand
- Building your product
As an team member, you can call yourself lucky if you can work on and influence one or two of these topics. As a CEO, I’m involved in all of them one way or another. That often brings a lot of challenges for me personally, because learning and figuring out how to bring value to each of these areas is important.
One of the things outside of work, family, and sports that I’ve learned to enjoy over the last few years is spending time in my orchard. At first glance, building a company and planting trees don’t seem very similar, but I’ve been able to find some similarities here and there. In both cases, it’s impossible to get results quickly. You often have to set up the basics, let things evolve and see how it will work over time. You can change and tune different aspects, but it’s very hard to replace or change a whole tree or a whole company.
Seeing and making these small iterative changes is what makes these two activities similar and fun. As a leader, you have to own your decisions for years to come.
I personally like sports movies, and one of my all time favourites is Any Given Sunday. I think Al Pacino’s locker room pep talk is a really great analogy for life and teamwork. Every day, every week or even in every deal, we have to fight for every inch we can to move forward and get better. Have a look at that movie and tell me it doesn’t work that way.
I’ve spent the last year on quite a lot of small tasks which I hope will come to fruition in 2026.
- Building our People team from the ground up and setting it up to scale
- Focusing on our Customer Success team and making sure they have enough time and space to make a difference
- Focusing on our product [LARA]
People Team
Everywhere I worked before, I heard that people are the cornerstone of a company. Seldom was it more than just words. At Labyrinth Labs, we always want to stand by those words. We want to build a culture that strives, encourages teamwork and learning.
I spent the better part of the year hiring a new Head of People and building a People team that could help our company scale. We have been growing at our current pace for a while, and I felt it was time to accelerate our growth for the future.
I want to thank everyone who worked in our People team before Zuzka and Zuzi came on board [easier to remember their names, I guess 🙂]. You all did a great job and showed us what we need and how to move forward.
No matter how good your culture is, people will hardly believe you when you just tell them. Finding ways to communicate and describe how your company works is often hard. At the end of the year, we finally finished our work with Cocuma, who came to our offices and helped us build one kick-ass Labyrinth Labs culture page. Go have a look and read it yourself.
During the year, we organised an amazing hackathon, you can read about it here.
Customer Success
When we started Labyrinth Labs 7 years ago, I personally knew every single customer we had and was involved in each project. This is no longer possible at our current scale, and that’s why I see the Customer Success team as extremely important.
Hiring people for this team often feels like searching for unicorns. You need to find people who are technically capable of having discussions with customer engineers, who know when to engage them and when to involve someone from engineering, and who frankly also have a sales gene.
We already had one unicorn in our team starting in 2025, Stano, who was doing a hell of a job and honestly needed some help handling the number of customers we had. Matej joined our team in November and is slowly working his way through our customers and portfolio.
Our Customer Success team is often the interface between Labyrinth Labs and our customers. They have regular conversations, look for opportunities where we can improve customer experience, and often communicate back to the technical team when customers need new features. One of our end-of-year traditions is also having a dinner with our customers to talk about everything we went through during the year.
For 2026, we want to build a more organised plan for how we talk to and gather feedback from our customers. I think being an AWS CEE Consulting Partner of the Year two years in a row speaks for itself and for our Customer Success team doing a great job.
Product
I spent the better part of the year working on our product, LARA. Our customers need to move forward, and so do we. We gathered feedback about features our customers are looking for. Being able to connect Customer Success with our product often lies in the hands of our Chief LARA Officer [Odstrk].
Last year, we were able to ship two major releases and four minor ones. Each release brought new updates and features, and most importantly, made life easier for our customers. From saving costs, optimising cross-AZ traffic, to better observability.
It’s amazing to see LARA evolving in front of my eyes. I’m really looking forward to seeing what the future brings for LARA.
The End
One of the slogans from our kick-ass culture page made by Cocuma is: Journey before destination. When I first read it, it made a strong impression on me. I liked it from the beginning, and the more I think about it, the more I like it.
Last year was definitely more about the journey than the destination. I really enjoyed our ride in 2025, and I’m looking forward to what 2026 will bring.
