What changes when a teal company gets a CTO: Lukáš Rychtecký on the role

For a long time, Applifting did not have a CTO. That made sense in a flat organisation: technical direction, delivery quality, and many bigger decisions were shared across the company. But as Applifting grew and AI began reshaping how software gets built, the limits of that setup became more visible.

Lukáš Rychtecký, now Applifting’s CTO, talks about what the role looks like in a company based on teal principles, why continuity matters, and how much of his work is still about working alongside teams rather than sitting above them.

Not the most obvious path into software

Lukáš didn't originally plan to work in software. He started by studying electronics, which—in the nineties—sounded like a reasonable direction for someone who liked computers but did not yet know what to do with that interest. 

The reality was less convincing. "I hated programming," Lukáš laughs. "We were doing assembly language, and I had absolutely no idea how adding numbers together was supposed to make a row of LEDs blink. My brain just didn't work that way."

What helped was getting closer to information systems, where programming was tied to problems he could actually picture: a business situation to understand, a solution to design, a project to deliver. Over time, Lukáš became more interested in how the whole project comes together than in coding on its own. That is what eventually brought him closer to solution architecture, and later made the move into leadership feel like a continuation rather than a complete change of direction.

From solution architect to CTO

For a long time, Applifting did not have a CTO at all. The company ran on a flat, self-managing structure, with strategic decisions handled collectively by an elected group of colleagues called the Council of Elders. For a while, that was enough.

"In the beginning, a lot of things just worked because the market was doing well. When conditions tightened, you started to see the gaps. Teams running into issues, inconsistent project processes, problems nobody had really gotten around to fixing because there was always another new project coming in."

To some people, formalising those fixes felt bureaucratic. Lukáš is direct about the tension. "It looks like rules. But the point is that when your colleague on a different project makes a mistake, you want to learn from it, not repeat it. That only works if there is a shared way of doing things."

Why continuity matters

There was also a structural reason for creating a permanent CTO position. In the Council of Elders, two seats rotated every six months—that kept the structure democratic, but it made it harder to keep momentum on changes that needed more time.

"Changes at this level take a few months to show up at all, sometimes longer. If someone new comes twice a year, continuity is hard to maintain." The people in leadership needed to be there long enough to see whether what they were doing was actually working.

The title formalised what was already happening. "My work as a solution architect overlapped a lot with what a CTO does. It was more of an official recognition than a change of direction."

What the CTO job actually looks like

Lukáš lives in his calendar. Beyond that, the days do not follow a clean pattern.

There are operational periods, when his time is taken up by whatever needs attention that week: a client situation, a hiring decision, or a project that has got stuck and needs someone to help move it forward.

Then there are more strategic periods, when he carves out space for longer-term work, like designing processes or preparing the groundwork for something that will become visible months later.

Technical leadership in a flat organisation

Applifting runs without traditional management hierarchies. People work in self-organising teams with a lot of autonomy. For someone in a leadership role, authority depends less on the title and more on trust, context, and how well people understand why a change is happening.

"The closeness matters," Lukáš says. "People have worked with me. They have seen how I think. When I need to introduce a change, that history makes a difference. I am not just someone they vaguely recognise from a Christmas party, suddenly telling them to do things differently."

When communication is not enough

That does not mean everything is frictionless. In any organisation, there will be people who read the same situation differently, hear about a decision second-hand, and fill in the gaps with their own assumptions.

"You can communicate constantly, explain your reasoning, be transparent. And there will still be a small number of people who see it as something it is not." His response is not to push harder on persuasion. "You cannot win everyone over. What you can do is make sure the environment is honest enough that people feel able to say when they disagree directly, rather than in the kitchen."

Bringing AI into software delivery

One of Lukáš's current focuses is integrating AI properly into Applifting's delivery process. Not encouraging developers to use AI tools individually, which is already happening, but building it into the structure of how projects run.

"There is a version of AI adoption that is just individuals experimenting. You get some good results, but also a lot of inconsistency. What we are working on is making it part of the delivery model, with the right processes and a pricing approach that reflects what it actually costs."

Where AI still needs technical accountability

The vision of a non-technical person building an entire system over a weekend strikes Lukáš as closer to marketing than reality.

"You can absolutely use AI to build something useful at home. But if you are running a real business, there are security questions, compliance questions, edge cases—the kind of issues that surface on real-world AI projects. Someone with technical responsibility still needs to be accountable for that. AI helps them do more, faster. It does not replace the judgment."

For his own work, he uses it as a thinking partner, particularly for tasks he is doing for the first time. "There are things you only do once or twice in a career, and it is hard to get good at them. I will use it to stress-test a model I am building, to check what I have missed. It saves time. But I’m still the one making the decisions.”

Building the company behind the software

When Lukáš talks about what he enjoys in his role, he keeps returning to the same thought. He does not miss writing code. What he does miss is the feeling of creating something. In this role, he has found it in a different place.

"When you are building software, you are creating a product that people use. The code is the thing. Here, the thing I am building is the company itself: the processes, the environment, how it feels to work here, what kinds of clients we take on. It is a more abstract kind of making, but it scratches the same itch."

What good technical leadership looks like

"The goals that follow from that are fairly simple—for Applifting to stay relevant, to be a place where good people want to be because the work is interesting. And to have clients who stay for years rather than engagements that come and go."

"Long-term clients mean calmer teams, better revenue, and more room to do good work. Everything connects."

He measures a good day not by a to-do list but by looking back. "I keep a weekly log. There are always things I thought I would get to and did not. But when I look back at the week, I usually realise I got more done than it felt like at the time," Lukáš concluded.