From Founder to Founding Engineer

This is my first blog post here at Querio and after just three weeks here, I wasn't entirely sure what specifically to write about: the Montenegro offsite, myself, the Querio product or how it's been moving from a founder to an employee? Trying to narrow it down to just a single topic is hard, so screw it — I won't.

Introductions

First things first, I should introduce myself. I'm Mohammed, the freshest engineer in Querio's crack team. Just before joining, I was a Co-Founder and CTO at a Querio-adjacent startup, which since joining here has resulted in some interesting observations amidst the transition. I've spent the last year talking with founders and product teams suffering the exact pain points as the majority of Querio's customers which not only gives me the unique opportunity to offer some of my findings to the team but now so obviously see how and why Querio can, and will win in this space.Fun fact: I actually met Rami and Javier in November 2024, just as they were hiring Nik, at YC Startup School in London — and picked Javi's brains on how they were architecting their solution (scoping out the competition..), since then I'd kept an eye on their progress.Querio's approach to solving the data problem is fundamentally different from how I had previously approached it — not a complete departure, but substantially different. Moving to this new stack has been refreshing and is dusting the cobwebs off of some of the complacency I had being the only engineer at my last startup.

Montenegro

Starting a new job can be daunting, the feeling of butterflies the night before as you get your outfit ready, prep your lunch and make sure your alarm and backup alarms are all set. But that pales in comparison to waking up at 2am to get an Uber across London to meet your new team for the first time at Gatwick Airport, before embarking upon a week long company offsite in Montenegro. But don't get it twisted, I think this was perhaps the perfect way for me to start at Querio. Immediately thrown in the deep end of understanding team dynamics, learning about everyone and their backgrounds, chipping in with my two cents on heated debates, observing sales calls while also trying (and failing) to paddle-board, trekking up a mountain and apparently getting a hit put out on me by every mosquito in Montenegro.All in all, Montenegro was fantastic and offered me the perfect environment to get up to speed with how the team works, start shipping code into prod and getting persuaded to drop Cursor in favour of Vim.. (WIP)

From Founder to Founding Team

Founding a startup was a profound and anxiety inducing experience — one that I don't regret and hope to do again someday in the future, but nonetheless came with significant challenges and rewards. From that perspective, it's been quite inspiring in all honesty to watch Rami and Javier do their thing, day to day, with certainly a lot more grace than could be said for myself. It's something that has been mentioned in blog posts before this, but it's worth saying — the team at Querio is where its at. The depth of knowledge and experience from everyone here is energising to be around and is already actively pushing me to be better every day. This team is the bee's knees.To go from an engineering team of just myself, to having two more around me has been both a wake up call and a welcome change.I had my fingers in so many pies, that engineering felt like just another part of my job, one that I deeply cared about, but just another part of my job. I was drawing things up on FigJam, then hopping into Figma for a quick wireframe, perhaps a full screen, then pop open Cursor and get cracking with the implementation. But also, tracking customer success, doing lead generation, maintaining the landing site, speaking with potential customers, it was everything, always and engineering was just another part of it.This isn't to say that engineering wasn't a priority, but I certainly wasn't treating it the same as I am now. Here I am an engineer first, there I was a fast-moving generalist. And it feels good to be so tightly focused right now — despite still helping out across the team. So when I say I feel refreshed and locked in to what we're building here — you can believe the frame of reference from which I'm coming from.Here, I'm (rightfully) getting called out for sloppy mistakes and shortcuts, now that I have multiple people reviewing my code and pushing me to be the best I can be — indubitably making me a better programmer and more thoughtful teammate.

Final Thoughts

I appreciate this blog post has been a bit all over the place, but it's been an exciting and busy last few weeks so I think this accurately represents the beginning of my journey at Querio.I promise that the next post will be engineering focused — we're working on some cool new features and some deeper changes that reflect how we want to better deliver our solution to our customers that I look forward to sharing more details later on.

Till the next one, peace.

— msh