The long version — First Penguin · Kavish Weerawardane

I'm Kavi — a product executive in Helsinki. The short version of my career: I keep ending up where the product, the business and the infrastructure meet, and I keep choosing to build with my own hands longer than a title says I should. Most of what I know, I learned by shipping something, carrying the consequences, and writing down what actually happened.

That last habit became this notebook. The rest of this page is the long version — how I work, where I've been, and the two animals you'll keep running into.

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How I work

Four commitments, stated plainly so you can hold me to them:

first_principles frameworks borrowed, never worshipped — process stays thin, ownership stays high

attribution hands-built vs. built-to-my-spec, always labeled — here, in my CV, and across an interview table

ai_posture agents in production with scopes and review gates; augmenting people, never quietly replacing them

the_pager if I ship it, I help carry it — infrastructure is everyone's job

The path

Eras rather than dates, each with the receipt that mattered:

the agency years Built websites for real clients and managed developers senior to me. Learned early that shipping beats theorizing, and that credit belongs to whoever did the work.

the developer-tools years Product marketing for an open-source developer platform. First lesson in building for people who build — developers smell marketing a mile away.

event tech, from zero Joined an event-tech company and built its integrations business from nothing: a Zapier app, self-hosted middleware, monitoring and docs with my own hands, a public API built to my spec by our engineers. Hundreds of integrations delivered; the platform ended up cited in ~80% of company ARR.

the turnaround Logo retention 45% → 70%. Killed a product people liked — including me. Learned that kill calls carry more information than wins.

the cloud exit Moved us off the cloud onto self-managed infrastructure: −78% spend, six weeks from product exec to production duty, ISO-27001 along the way. The pager became personal.

now Running a 20-person product & technology org with a shipping core of a dozen. Steering the next platform bet — token scopes for half-trusted agents — and writing one dive here every two weeks.

The penguin & the bear

the penguin

The colony waits at the edge of the ice. Nobody knows if there's a leopard seal down there. Someone has to jump first — and then everyone knows.

An old idea (Randy Pausch gave awards for it) and my job description in practice: jump first, surface, report honestly. The classic telling stops at the jump; this notebook is the part where the penguin comes back with notes.

the bear

Full disclosure: the bear has no metaphorical mandate. I've loved bears my whole life, and a personal site should hold at least one thing that exists purely because it makes its owner happy.

Then he earned his keep anyway. The bear reviews each dive from the shore, peers over edges, declines bad jumps, and toboggans where the penguin swims — which, between agents that act and a human who reviews, is a fairly exact picture of how I run production systems. Some mascots you choose; some you discover you already had. He mostly appears when you click things.