Theo Zourzouvilys

I’m half English and half Greek, but not fully at home in either. I had one foot in each place; too English to be truly Greek, too Greek to ever feel fully English. But my culture carries both. I was shaped by olive groves and naval charts, by stone villages and salt-stung harbors, by stories told in different languages but driven by the same values. That tension shaped how I see the world.

I never felt like I fully belonged anywhere, but in more recent years, I started to realize that this in-between place gave me something valuable. I learned to see from multiple angles at once, to hold contradictions without needing to resolve them. I became an observer, a translator, a connector. And while it made me quieter in some ways, it also made me sharper. That mix gave me empathy, stubbornness, and a reverence for nuance. It also gave me fire.

I was born in 1983 in Plymouth, Devon, England and adopted at four years old by my great-grandparents, Peter and Yvonne. While most people my age were raised by the postwar generation or by those raised in its shadow, I grew up in the care of people who had lived through it directly. Peter served in the British Navy. Yvonne worked in military hospitals as part of the Women’s Royal Naval Service. They were already in their seventies when I was a child, and their own parents had been born in the 1800s. That generational distance gave me a sense of the world that was markedly different from my peers, less shaped by modern convenience and more by memory, duty, and lived consequence.

Peter earned the Distinguished Service Cross for slipping into Nazi-occupied harbors under cover of darkness. He was a Lieutenant Commander in the British Navy, commanding operations in the Aegean that involved sabotaging German supply lines and disrupting the machinery of war. But the stories he shared weren’t about medals. They were about necessity. About responsibility. About doing what had to be done when the world turns dark and uncertain. Yvonne brought quiet strength and precision, managing the details that kept people grounded. Together, they gave me more than a place to grow up. They gave me a framework for how to live.

Their influence left me with a deep sense of scale and an early understanding of what leadership really is. It isn’t performance, image, or control. It’s showing up. Doing the hard thing when no one’s watching. Holding steady when others can’t. And above all, it’s knowing what you will and won’t tolerate.

That clarity stayed with me. I have no patience for cruelty, bullying, or intolerance in any form. Whether it’s power used to humiliate, systems that dehumanize, or everyday small acts of dismissal, I see it for what it is, and I will not ignore it. I was raised to believe you don’t need to shout to take a stand, but you do need to stand. And I always will.

The second half of my childhood brought me into the world of my father's family, a lineage marked not by resistance but by survival. They were refugees from the Greek Genocide. Their story wasn’t one of medals or missions. It was about loss. Loss of home, of family, of safety, and the quiet, determined act of rebuilding from nothing.

They fled murder, displacement, and silence, carrying the weight of everything that had been taken from them. But they never lost their dignity. They never surrendered their self-respect. They held onto their identity, their culture, and the quiet strength that comes from surviving what should have broken them.

They eventually found their future on the north shores of Lesvos. And there, something extraordinary happened. The community welcomed them. Not reluctantly, and not at a distance. They were taken in, supported, and treated not just as visitors, but as neighbors. And over time, as locals. That welcome wasn’t loud or ceremonial. It was woven into daily life, into the way people made space at their tables and stood beside them in the work of living.

Through it all, my family carried themselves with steadiness and earned deep respect in the village. Not through titles or wealth, but through decency, contribution, and presence. That exchange, the courage to stay upright through devastation and the grace of being welcomed into something new, showed me what community really is. It isn’t just proximity. It is the act of making space, of choosing inclusion, of seeing people for who they are and standing beside them without needing to be asked.

From one side of my family, I learned what it means to stand up to evil. To take action when the world becomes dangerous. From the other, I learned compassion for those who suffer at its hands. My great-grandparents taught me to fight with discipline, clarity, and purpose. My father’s family taught me how to rebuild, how to forgive, and how to carry grief without letting it consume you. Together, those two inheritances shaped me at the root. I believe in resistance where resistance is required, and I believe just as deeply in restoration. I believe in doing what is necessary, and in choosing what comes next. Both sides taught me that strength is not just in survival or defiance. It’s in what you build after, and how you treat people along the way.

My path into adulthood wasn’t smooth. I didn’t really have parents in the conventional sense. I lived alone as a teenager, navigating the world without a clear sense of who was looking out for me. When I was fifteen, my girlfriend was twenty-eight. At an age when most were just figuring out high school, I was already immersed in a life that felt accelerated, raw, and disorienting. I learned to survive by closing parts of myself off. I felt nothing and everything, often at the same time.

That emotional tension ran deep. Being half Greek and half English only sharpened it. One side of me burned with feeling, opinion, and immediacy. The other side taught restraint, formality, and holding it all in. I struggled with that duality for years. I still do, in some ways. It made it hard to know where I fit. Hard to know how to express what I was carrying.

It wasn’t until my twenties, and especially into my thirties, that I began to untangle some of it. Being adopted, even into my own extended family, left its mark. It’s something I still carry. It can affect how I see my own worth, how I process love, and how I understand belonging. Some of those wounds are hard to name, and even harder to explain. But through all of it, people have shown up for me. I’ve been guided. I’ve been supported. And I’ve been loved. It is the act of making space, of choosing inclusion, of seeing people for who they are and standing beside them without needing to be asked.

At seventeen, I moved back to England. I had no formal education or credentials, only a strong willingness to learn and the kind of lived experience that rarely fits neatly onto a resume. But I didn’t think a future in computers was really available to me. I hadn’t gone to school. I hadn’t gone to university. That kind of work felt like it belonged to other people, the ones who took the right classes, followed the right path.

So I signed up for a community college program in Hospitality Management. It seemed like a more realistic way to build a future. But computers were still all I thought about. I spent my days at college and my nights, weekends, and early mornings devouring everything I could find on programming, networks, and operating systems. I scraped together what little money I had for software and books, and lived in every scrap of documentation I could get my hands on.

My first exposure to Linux came at this time. It started with RedHat Linux 5.0, which i think came on a CD on the front of a computer magazine. I was fascinated by the power and transparency of open source, and drawn to the culture around it — a space where curiosity mattered more than credentials.

While I was at school for Hospitality Management, I rented a room in a shared house. One of the other tenants was a Greek guy named Costa, who was attending Plymouth University. We became close friends. Through him, I was able to use the university's computer labs, sneak into lectures, and access the library. I soaked up everything I could. Those resources became my lifeline, a backdoor into the education I never formally had. Around that same time, I downloaded the Apache HTTP web server and began picking through its source code. I taught myself C by reading it, compiling it, running it, and trying to write a module. That experience was pivotal. It was where I first got hooked, not just on Linux or scripting, but on servers, network protocols, and software development as a craft.

During that same time, I found a small community online, first on Usenet, then on a MUD, a text-based virtual world that became a lifeline. Some of those people became lifelong friends. One of them was Rachel Andrew, who would go on to become well-known in the CSS and web standards community. Back then, she was a webmaster at a startup called Propertyfinder. They were looking for a systems administrator. I wasn’t qualified in the traditional sense, but somehow, I and I’m sure Rachel managed to convince the CTO that I was the right person for the job.

London was expensive, and I couldn’t afford a place to live. So I stayed at the office, in Mayfair. I slept on the floor under my desk, worked late into the night, and was often woken up in the early hours by cleaning staff vacuuming around me. I was figuring it out in real time, terrified of being found out but determined to prove I belonged. That job didn’t just teach me systems administration. It taught me the kind of resourcefulness you only discover when there’s no other option.

Within a few months, something started to shift. Even though I had no formal qualifications, I found myself helping the software development team troubleshoot things they were struggling with. Their platform was written in classic Visual Basic ASP, backed by Microsoft SQL Server, a world I didn’t come from. I was steeped in open source, Linux, C, Perl, Bash, and RCS. So one weekend, mostly to learn and stretch myself, I decided to try and write the web application using mod_perl and MySQL. It wasn’t meant to be serious. It was just a way to understand how everything worked. But somehow, that version ended up becoming the product. It went into production and became the foundation the company built on.

That was my introduction to software development in a real-world environment. It wasn’t academic, It wasn’t planned. It was just curiosity, obsession, stubbornness, and a deep desire to understand how everything fit together. Without realizing it, I had stepped into the world of SaaS products and discovered that I belonged there. And for the first time, I saw clearly that this path, this messy, scrappy, powerful craft, might actually be mine.

From there, I launched my own web hosting business with some friends, and leaned hard into infrastructure. That evolved into an ISP offering internet service (dial-up, DSL, and leased lines), and built a successful data center hosting company. I managed racks of physical servers, built provisioning systems, wrote internal automation tooling, and lived in the terminal, on the datacenter floor (and often underneath it). I learned networking by necessity — switching, routing, BGP, OSPF — and by trial and error under real production pressure. It was the kind of hands-on systems work that leaves lasting instincts.

In parallel, I was writing code constantly. I hacked Apache modules, maintained Perl modules on CPAN, and contributed to the Asterisk PBX project with modules like chan_sccp and chan_bluetooth. I built a MUD client (a text-based multiplayer world long before Slack or IRC channels) and learned what it meant to write code that other people actually used. Everything I built had a real user on the other end and often a real system depending on it.

Much of my early work involved reverse-engineering proprietary protocols, particularly Cisco’s, and replacing them with open source implementations. I built a custom SMTP server that powered a commercial ISP, and I got increasingly interested in the fragile interfaces between systems — the edges where things break quietly and slowly. This curiosity pulled me deeper into protocols and ultimately into the world of SIP and VoIP.

I wasn’t just using the SIP stack. I helped in the ecosystem. I wrote an early implementation, contributed to standardization efforts, and eventually became co-chair of an IETF RAI working group. I co-authored several IETF drafts and RFC 6026, and published technical writing in IEEE Spectrum. My focus was always on making real systems more reliable, not just more compliant.

That trajectory brought me to Skype, where I joined an advanced engineering team rewriting Skype from a clean-room implementation. I later moved into Skype’s infrastructure organization, helping projects moving the platform from a decentralized P2P network to a global server-based architecture. I was a senior engineer and architect during one of the most intense periods of growth the company saw. Skype reached over 250 million active users, carried more than 40 percent of all international voice traffic, and became a cornerstone of modern communication. My work spanned infrastructure design, monitoring systems, security tooling, metrics collection, and internal cloud platform architecture. But it also involved navigating the human complexity of scaling a distributed engineering team across five offices in North America and Europe.

That work led to nine patents, covering everything from certificate revocation and SIP reliability to datacenter orchestration, event stream handling, and adaptive network routing. These weren’t theoretical ideas. They were developed in production systems and battle-tested at scale.

After Skype was acquired by Microsoft for $8.5 billion, I joined Jive Communications — then a scrappy 50-person company. I led engineering through a period of dramatic growth, scaling from 50 to over 500 people in three years. When I arrived, the system was brittle, overloaded, and constantly on fire. When I left, it was a robust, modern platform used by hundreds of thousands of customers. I drove the technical strategy, led the architectural transformation, opened new engineering centers, and helped reshape the culture. I also sat on the board, supported five acquisitions, led technical due diligence, and helped grow the company to a nine-figure valuation. That chapter ended with a successful acquisition by LogMeIn (now GoTo).

From there, I joined Auth0 to work with the CTO on advanced infrastructure, innovation, and platform. My work spanned realtime systems, low-level database internals, streaming infrastructure, and high-scale AWS patterns. We were supporting an identity platform with security at its core, which meant reliability, observability, and careful architectural design were essential. I parachuted into high-pressure projects that needed rescuing and helped build long-term foundations for others to scale.

After that, I took a role as CTO of FluentStream, a Providence Strategic Growth portfolio company executing a roll-up strategy in telecom. The company had strong fundamentals and a valuable product, but the platform was aging, and the engineering culture was under strain. There were stability issues, legacy systems, and a team that needed better support and direction. Alongside a new CEO and leadership team, we led a full turnaround: refactoring the platform, re-energizing the culture, and putting the company on a stable path forward. We improved security, modernized the architecture, and created the kind of engineering environment where teams could thrive. I also led multiple acquisitions and handled deep technical diligence, helping to prepare the business for its next phase of growth.

Today, I’m one of the founders of Six Fathoms, a small, deeply experienced engineering firm. We partner with teams building software that truly matters, systems with significant complexity, real risk, and long-term consequences. We are the team you call when the platform absolutely cannot fail and the problems lack clean documentation.

While I’ve served in roles including CTO, founder, and board-level advisor, I’ve worked closely with CEOs, investors, and technical leaders at every level. Yet I’ve always remained hands-on, writing production code, reviewing designs, debugging live incidents, and coaching engineers individually.

Sometimes leadership means optimizing a critical code path to shave off milliseconds. Sometimes it involves taking charge during an incident to restore calm and direction. Sometimes it is helping a team finally solve a design challenge that has been blocking progress for months. Often, it is about rebuilding trust and momentum across an entire engineering organization. Not through theatrics, but through steady communication, clear vision, and quiet consistency.

I believe good systems thinking starts with asking the right questions. What are we optimizing for? What constraints are real? Where is the leverage? The best engineering decisions aren’t always clever. They are rooted in deep context and thoughtful restraint.

Leadership, for me, is about creating clarity amidst complexity. It is about knowing when to go deep into the details, when to zoom out, and how to build teams that take genuine pride in their work. I do not lead through fear. I do not believe in hierarchy for its own sake. I take responsibility, ask thoughtful questions, and do the work alongside my team.

For most of my life, I felt like I was catching up. I left school at thirteen and never went back. I didn’t have a degree or the pedigree that opened doors for others. What I had was work ethic, grit, and the need to prove I belonged. Not just in the room, but in the field itself. I poured myself into building, into learning, into showing through output what others could show with titles. That drive carried me far, but it also never let me rest. I kept pushing, not just to build things, but to justify being there at all.

Then, at thirty-nine, after three back-to-back successful exits, I finally paused. Not because I ran out of momentum, but because I was ready to reflect. When I looked back, I saw something I had never fully let myself feel: pride. I had built what I dreamed of building. I had made a life far beyond what the teenage me thought was possible. I could be content, not complacent, but grounded in what I had already earned.

That realization came with stillness. The kind that makes you breathe deeper. That asks not, “What else can I prove?” but, “What do I want to become?” I knew one thing clearly. I didn’t want to drift. I didn’t want to slide into ease or let life start happening without me. So I made a change. I didn’t just want to build well. I wanted to live well, too.

These days, I live and work on my boat, Eelyos, from the remote coastlines of British Columbia and Alaska, exploring and anchoring in places where the systems you rely on cannot afford to be fragile. It is a life that demands reverence for the forces that shape it and rewards presence, preparation, and adaptability.

That mindset carries into every system I build. The sea doesn’t care how clever you are. It asks only that you pay attention, that you respect it, and that you plan with care.

Sailing reminds me why I started building in the first place. It keeps me honest. It makes space for reflection. It has taught me what good engineering and good seamanship have in common. Both are quiet. Both are resilient. And both are built to last.

If you’ve made it this far, you don’t need a reason to say hi. I’m working remotely from my boat in Alaska all summer, which means I’m about as off-grid as it gets, and I really value the chance to connect with people over Google Meet. I’m not chasing a job, a client, or an adventure, but I’m open to all of it. I love hearing what people are building, thinking about, struggling with, dreaming about, or navigating in life. You don’t need a pitch or a project. Just real conversation. If something sparks, great. And if not, we’ll still have shared a moment. And if nothing else, we’ll have shared a moment of human connection, which matters more than most things. Just schedule a call to say hi.

Langley, WA - April 2025