I’m Xavi Esteve, a CTO based in Barcelona (formerly in London). I’ve been building digital products for over 20 years, and in recent years I’ve also built the companies and tech departments behind them.
Today I’m CTO and a member of the Board of Directors at VICIO, which has grown from a single dark kitchen into a multi-chain restaurant group with €70M in annual recurring revenue. Before that I co-founded the HealthTech startup Joyners as its CTO, and worked for companies such as LOVEFiLM (acquired by Amazon), Softonic and Agilent Technologies (HP).
My role as CTO
I still write code, but most of my work is making sure technology helps the business grow. At VICIO that covers:
- Strategy: deciding what to build, what to buy and what not to do at all, based on what each option costs and returns.
- The team: hiring, mentoring and managing engineers, designers and product people, and defining how we work together.
- Budget: infrastructure, tools, suppliers and people.
- Products: I planned and built Deliclever from scratch, the SaaS platform our kitchens run on. It handles order management, integrations with delivery partners such as Glovo and Uber Eats, a kitchen display system and other tools that speed up every order.
- Processes across the company: improving productivity in every department, from operations to finance, not only engineering.
- Security, data and reliability for systems our restaurants depend on every day.
VICIO’s growth has been covered as a case study by universities, the press and podcasts, and the tools we built in-house compete with products from companies that have raised millions. Thanks to my vision and years of experience I’ve been able to manage a huge infrastructure and maintain thousands of devices with just a handful of engineers.
Building with AI
I believe in AI when it’s used for good. I use it every day to design, write and review software and to automate work across the business that used to take hours by hand, and I run a few self-hosted models alongside my own personal agents, skills and MCP servers.
I evaluate AI the way I evaluate any technology: it has to make something measurably faster, cheaper or better for the people using it. I follow new models and tools closely, try them on real problems and write about the ones that prove useful, such as Dictate, a private speech-to-text tool that runs entirely in the browser.
How I got here
I was born in Barcelona in the mid-80s and discovered the World Wide Web at seven, on a computer at my parents’ office. The Internet was small and slow then, mostly text, MIDI music and a few animated GIFs, but I was convinced it would change the world.
Once we had the Internet at home I taught myself to program in VB6, Delphi and some Assembly. I couldn’t afford paid software, so I wrote my own versions of it, often faster and easier to use than the originals. Compile times and platform compatibility eventually pushed me towards the web, where the same code runs on any device. I started designing and building websites in 2000 and got my first internship in 2002, while I was still studying.
From 2007 to 2009 I designed and developed websites and internal tools at Agilent Technologies (HP), a Fortune 500 company, in Barcelona’s World Trade Center. At 23 I moved to London to get out of my comfort zone. There I worked at Net Media Planet, an award-winning search marketing agency, and LOVEFiLM, the Netflix-like service later acquired by Amazon, then as a freelance developer and consultant for clients across the UK, from the global agency AKA to the country’s largest business finance intermediary. From 2012 to 2013 I was a senior front-end developer at Fitbug, a fitness-tracker startup. Along the way I founded several successful companies in Spain and the UK.
In 2014 I moved back to Barcelona and joined Softonic, one of the highest-traffic websites in Spain with over 100 million monthly users, and in 2015 I led front-end development at Parkimeter. That same year I co-founded Joyners, a platform connecting families with caregivers for seniors, and was its CTO until 2020, responsible for the product and technology strategy. Joyners generated more than €2M in its first two years, won several awards and was featured in Fortune, El País and La Vanguardia. I had also been consulting for companies in banking, finance, health, real estate, marketing and advertising before joining VICIO in 2021.
Working in so many markets, including health, finance, food, entertainment, real estate, design and marketing, has taught me to adapt quickly and to approach problems with an open mind. Solutions from one industry often work well in another.
Values and interests
I prefer simple technology, and I put usability before looks. Design trends change, but a good product lets people do what they came to do quickly. I wrote more about this in Simple Technology always wins.
I believe in a free and open Internet, and I release open source code, free tools and content whenever I can. Years ago I also volunteered as a social educator for children, teaching values such as solidarity, equality and respect.
Outside work I enjoy cooking, eating out, music, films, fitness, travelling and skateboarding.
What you’ll find here
- Linux & Tools: practical guides to Linux, self-hosting and the tools I use every day.
- Software Development: building for the web, and the projects I make.
- Leadership & Product: what I’ve learned as a CTO, lead developer and product manager.
- Projects: over 100 side projects, most of them free to use and open source.
Most articles are in English, with some in Spanish and Catalan.
Get in touch
My full CV is available online and as a PDF. You can also find me on LinkedIn and GitHub, or send me a message.
