#87: & Ownership Shift & The Lumos Formula
June 22, 2025 – DevTools Brew #867
I’m Morgan Perry, co-founder of Qovery. Every week, I share the raw, often uncomfortable lessons from building and scaling a tech startup from 0 to 1 and beyond.
In today's edition:
Ownership Shift
→ What happens when your systems no longer scale with the people inside them and how we’re learning to rebuild from the inside out.The Lumos Formula
→ Why evolving faster than your company might be the hardest (and most underrated) job of a founder.
Let’s dive in.
Ownership Shift
Execution without context isn’t autonomy but dependency.
We used to ship fast.
At 10 people, everything felt sharp.
Feedback loops were tight. Specs were clear.
As founders, we stayed close to every part of the chain:
→ customer tension
→ product decisions
→ team priorities
Most things worked because the team was structured for it.
We felt the pain. We wrote the tickets. The team executed with clarity and speed.
But somewhere between 10 and 20 people, that started to break.
Slowly.
We noticed it in small signals:
→ Founders becoming bottlenecks
→ People waiting instead of leading
→ Execution becoming blurry, not because people got slower but because they got disconnected
Disconnected from the context.
From the why.
From the problem behind the spec.
And it wasn’t a team issue. It was a system issue.
We had grown.
But our operating model hadn’t.
The team was still wired to do what’s handed down, not to own the outcome.
And the founders were still the source of too much truth.
What we needed was a shift: in posture, not just process.
From execution → ownership.
From answering → enabling.
From holding the clarity → distributing it.
And we’re in the middle of it right now.
No playbook. No neat turnaround. Just… the work.
But here’s what I’m starting to learn and the early guardrails (so far)
→ Clarity over control
We don’t need to tell people what to do.
We need to give them the clearest possible understanding of why it matters.
That’s what unlocks real autonomy.
→ Letting go of answers
The team won’t step up if we keep stepping in.
Letting go means embracing how others think and not just how we would’ve done it.
→ Transferring energy
Ownership needs context, but it also needs momentum.
If we don’t transfer the tension, the urgency, the “why now”… no one runs with it.
→ Spotting the real owners
This shift reveals people.
Some rise. Some wait.
But we’re finally seeing who wants to lead from where they are.
→ One shift at a time
It’s not about blowing everything up.
It’s about finding the places where the system blocks ownership and rebuilding them from first principles.
We’re not done. Not even close.
This is just part one.
We’re still in the middle of the shift and like any real change, some things will break.
Some bets won’t land. Some habits will resist.
But others will click. And when they do, they’ll raise the bar for good.
We’ll get things wrong.
We’ll learn (probably the hard way).
So I’ll share that too, in part 2.
🍿
The Lumos Formula
Scaling as a founder means evolving faster than your company.
“You don’t fail because you’re not smart enough. You fail because your growth rate lags behind your company’s.”
Andrej Safundzic (Lumos) doesn’t look like your typical tech startup CEO.
He talks more about storytelling than IAM. He jokes about banana peels in the middle of hypergrowth. But don’t let the light tone fool you; his clarity is surgical.
Here’s what I loved in his story:
→ He dropped out of Stanford MBA to build Lumos.
→ His first big win? Getting the German Chancellery to acquire his govtech startup.
→ Today, Lumos serves giants like GitHub and United Airlines. But it wasn’t by chasing features—it was by crafting a system that scales people.
What stood out most to me wasn’t the product. It was the mindset.
Andrej knows that startup phases move faster than most founders do.
So he treats himself like a system to evolve.
“Every 3 to 6 months, I need to evolve like a Pokémon.”
I’ve felt that too. That moment when your team outgrows your operating style. When what worked at 5, 10, or 20 people stops working and suddenly, you are the bottleneck.
Andrej’s response isn’t to add process. It’s to match mistakes faster.
To zoom out. And to get obsessed with one thing: how to keep growing ahead of the curve.
That shows up in how he builds his org too:
→ Leadership means doing the hard thing first
→ Systems > Heroes
→ Culture = energy transfer + clear direction
→ Your job is to lock in clarity, even when everything is still catching fire
“Play to win, not just to play”.
And honestly, that’s what separates the founders who scale from the ones who stall.
Not more ideas. But more evolution.
Final Thoughts
Startup friction isn’t always a sign something’s broken.
Sometimes, it’s a sign that the system around it hasn’t caught up yet.
Here’s the common tension bewteen both stories:
→ When clarity stops scaling
→ When execution starts drifting
→ And when the founders have to evolve, before the company does
Because growing a company is one thing.
But growing with it? That’s the real test.
The bottlenecks don’t announce themselves.
They show up quietly, in blurred priorities, delayed momentum, and teams waiting for answers that shouldn’t come from you anymore.
Your edge won’t hold on its own.
You have to keep choosing it.
→ In the systems you scale
→ In the clarity you transfer
→ In the version of yourself you’re willing to become
Founders don’t just need vision.
They need evolution.
See you next Sunday 👋
That’s it for me today! :)
Thanks for reading and Happy Sunday!
— Morgan
Do you like personal lessons like this? More insights/stories from other devtool founders? Let me know, I’m always open to feedback.
You can reach out to me on LinkedIn.