About four years ago, LSD Open hit a real crossroads. We were this scrappy but cool 30-person Linux/open-source niche services company with a massive reputation for technical wizardry. However, the internal structure was basically held together by duct tape, pure adrenaline and more Red Bull than I am proud of.
My chief technology officer was at a serious breaking point; he was doing everything from support tickets to sales proposals, while trying to lead a team of over 20 engineers who were all busy on different projects. It was high performing, sure, but it wasn’t scalable. LSD Open was a collection of brilliant individuals who weren’t a unified machine yet.
Today LSD Open is a 100% remote data-driven group expanding across the Middle East and Africa. It is slowly becoming an AI-enabled solutions integrator for some of the biggest banks and telecommunications operators in the country. The journey from there to here wasn’t about changing who we are at our core, but about maturing our nervous system.
Structure as a catalyst
The first big shift was structural. We moved away from that flat, chaotic hierarchy and into defined teams and “guilds” focused on support, platform, data and cloud. As CEO, this changed my life because each team and guild had a leader, and I started engaging with them instead of with every single person on the team. Execution got faster, and communication got simpler because I could finally delegate authority to these leaders to run their teams as they saw fit.
But structure without data is just a guessing game. Soon we realised that we were flying blind, using a fragmented mess of tools like Ora for tasks, Trello for CVs, and Pipedrive for sales and deal-tracking. The team was spending more time trying to integrate tools and double-checking the data in them than using them. It was clear that LSD Open needed something more mature and suited to where we were as a business.
The answer came through Zoho One and Google Workspace, which were gamechangers. For the first time, we had a single source of truth, and now we use Zoho Analytics to see everything in one place. We stopped saying, “I think everyone is fine”, and started looking at real data from our quarterly eNPS surveys, now knowing exactly where to focus our attention and energy. When you have actual data on the pain points your people are feeling, your leadership moves from reactive to proactive.
Culture in a 100% remote world
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, we didn’t just tolerate remote work; we embraced it as our permanent identity. We ditched the offices and moved our water cooler to Discord (yes, we literally have a voice channel called #watercooler).
To a traditional corporate exec, Discord probably looks like total chaos with all the memes, GIFs and public praise happening all day, but it works for us. We mapped the channels to our company structure, so communication stays high velocity but directed to the right people. It keeps that LSD start-up spirit alive even as we grow into a much more structured outfit.
The evolution of value
LSD Open has always been known to play with the new stuff. Twenty years ago, that was Linux. Then we were one of the first to embrace Kubernetes and Apache Kafka for large enterprise environments. That long track record of mastering complex cloud-native tech is why our customers trust us with AI now.
The team is currently working on an agentic AI project to help provide zero-touch ops for a massive customer. It is a “human-in-the-loop” approach, where the AI identifies the root cause and provides recommendations, but still has to go through the human operator for approval. As the tech improves, we’ll allow the AI to handle more of the non-destructive work.
Our expansion into the Middle East has shown us a cool contrast, too. In Dubai, the budgets for AI are massive. In South Africa, the budgets are tighter, but that just breeds innovation. We use open-source models to cater for GPU cards with less memory and combine on-site processing with things like AWS Bedrock to get the job done creatively.
The standard of leadership
The hardest part of this transition, for me, was moving from a hands-on technical role to a leader who has to allow people to fail so they can grow. Following the principles of Legitimate Leadership, we realise that our job is to provide the care and growth our people need.
Sometimes that means people move on because they aren’t the right fit for where the business is going, and those are always difficult days. But for the people who are here and staying, we are working our butts off to make sure they are taken care of. We’ve set a much higher standard for quality now, and we hold ourselves accountable to it.
Today LSD Open isn’t just a Linux company anymore. We’ve evolved from keeping the lights on to building the brains of the enterprise. We grew and structured up all without an office and without losing the soul that started this whole thing.
It’s a bit of a paradox, I suppose. We spent two decades mastering the most rigid technical systems on the planet, only to realise that the most powerful “open source” asset we ever had was our own people. By giving them the structure to fail and the data to succeed, we didn’t just build a more efficient company. We built one that actually knows where it’s going. In the world of AI, where everyone is chasing the next big model, it turns out that the most cutting-edge thing you can do is still just being a well-run human business.
- The author, Neil White, is CEO of LSD Open
- Read more articles by LSD Open on TechCentral
- This promoted content was paid for by the party concerned
