Francis Ma
AI engineer | Startup builder | ex-Google Sr. Director of Product & Engineering
Francis Ma is the founder of JoyCrew, an AI-native startup focused on helping businesses succeed with agentic AI.
Prior to this, he spent nearly 15 years at Google, leading product and engineering teams, including Firebase, a platform beloved by app developers. Before Google, he was a startup founder and engineering lead at Amazon.
He grew up in Canada and holds an engineering degree from the University of Waterloo. Outside of tech, he loves the craft of making coffee.
Think Like a CTO: The Durable Engineering Skill in the Agentic Era
Point ten agents at your codebase and you don't get 10x output; you get merge collisions, drifting context, confident slop. The gains are real, if you design the system that steers them. That's the system a CTO builds.
I've scaled orgs of hundreds at Google and led the team behind Firebase; now I'm a hands-on startup builder, running fleets of agents. Harnessing agentic intelligence takes the same evergreen skills as channeling human intelligence.
1. The architecture: decomposing problems so teams/agents can parallelize without colliding.
2. The vision and org: defining an outcome clear enough to align a thousand decisions, docs that ramp a new agent/human mid-task, staffing each problem to the right model or person.
3. The playbook: establishing feedback loops that turn bugs, metrics, and retros into a system that improves itself, and making judgment calls on where to push and where to cut.
In the agentic era, we all need to think like CTOs, and build the system that builds.