Hi, I'm Chris.

Chris Parsons

I have 25 years of experience running tech teams and founding startups. I’m co-founder/CTO of Cherrypick, the best meal-led grocery shopping assistant on the market.

I coach a limited number of technical founders and CTOs at funded startups. Book in a call if you need some help with your startup journey.

I know a lot about being a founder/early stage CTO of a fast growing startup, including hiring great technical teams, board and founder relationships, setting culture, finding product market fit, building just enough tech and how to build great AI products.

Previously I helped scale Gower Street from 7 to 50 employees and built a data science team from scratch. I trained hundreds of developers at the BBC and other organisations, and I helped GDS get started in the early days, working on GOV.UK and e-petitions. I ran the team that released the indie game Sol Trader in 2016, and I was Founder/CEO of Eden Development, a 12 person client services software firm, from 2005 to 2011.

You can find me on BlueSky, X and LinkedIn. Here are some of my more recent articles - subscribe with RSS to keep up with the latest.

How to Build a Robust LLM Application

Meal Generator

Last month at Cherrypick we launched a brand new meal generator that uses LLMs to create personalized meal plans.

It has been a great success and we are pleased with the results. Customers are changing their plans 30% less and using their plans in their baskets 14% more.

However, getting to this point was not straightforward, and we learned many things that can go wrong when building these types of systems.

Here is what we learned about building an LLM-based product that actually works, and ends up in production rather than languishing in an investor deck as a cool tech demo.

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Why Hybrid Work Works

As someone who lives an hour and a half from my London office, I love working from home. I can help my teenagers out of the door in the morning, and I am present when the family comes home. I can have coffee with my wife Ellie before we start work. I prepare dinner during my lunch break, and receive deliveries. I can contribute more effort during my day to Cherrypick, free from distractions, interruptions and the long commute. I would struggle to work effectively five days a week in London.

I also love working from the office. It is an opportunity to spend real time with the people I work with. Communication is easier and I spend less time on screens. I can train less experienced colleagues much more efficiently than video chat. I can ask for and give advice and help in person, cutting down long feedback cycles. I would struggle to work effectively five days a week from home.

Much of the debate around hybrid working appears to be a zero sum argument about why working from home is “better” or “worse”, and why working in the office is “more” or “less” productive.

One is not better than the other; they are just different. I think we need both for a balanced life.

Here are some pointers for how to have a productive conversation about hybrid in your team.

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The Job Is Not To Build

Startup CTOs or founding developers are the first technical people in the business. It is natural to think your job is to write code and build software. This is backwards.

Your first job is not to build software. Your role is to use your technical expertise to help the startup figure out fast if you have a valid solution to a compelling problem, and then a valid product for a big enough market.

You might do this through building software, but you might not need to.

Here is a story of how I did this wrong, and how you can do it right.

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See the Archive for more articles.