You Don't Need a CTO. You Need a Sreejith

Author

Jon Matzner
March 29, 2026

Every growing company hits a wall.

Not the "we need to raise money" wall or the "we need a better strategy" wall.

The "why the f&*k is Slack not syncing with Google Calendar" wall.

You know the one.

The CEO or GM becomes the unofficial IT department. Resetting passwords. Managing subscriptions nobody remembers signing up for. Debugging integrations at 10pm because the automated emails are firing five times instead of once.

Death by a thousand paper cuts. And you don't even realize you're bleeding.

At Sagan, I looked at our internal tech channel last week. In SEVEN DAYS, this came through:

  • HubSpot access requests for the sales team

  • Airtable table restructuring for account management

  • Video intros broken on the member portal

  • Duplicate automated emails firing 5x

  • Interview tool throwing errors

  • Google Drive permissions cleanup

  • Credit card setup for Tiktok Ads

  • Calendly link configuration

  • Security warnings on vibe-coded websites

  • Grok AI access provisioning

  • Dashboard bugs where candidates weren't showing up

One week. Every single one of those used to land on someone's desk who had other things to do.

The Invisible Tax

Once you're past 20 employees, your vendor stack grows faster than your team. Every new hire needs access to 6 tools. Every tool talks to 3 other tools. Every integration breaks in ways that are just annoying enough to ignore but expensive enough to matter.

And the person "handling IT" is usually someone who has a totally different job they're supposed to be doing.

Your ops person is debugging Airtable automations instead of building processes. Your account managers are filing tech tickets instead of managing accounts. Your CEO is on a Zoom call explaining how to get edit access to a Google Drive folder.

Enter Sreejith

He has zero traditional IT experience. No certifications. No computer science degree. No years at Accenture configuring enterprise firewalls.

He's just smart and he gives a shit.

That's the whole profile. Someone who's organized, learns fast, and actually cares whether the tools work. Someone who wakes up thinking about why the automated alert sent duplicate emails instead of just marking the ticket "closed."

We put him in charge of IT operations. Not "technology strategy." Not "digital transformation." IT. Ops. The unsexy stuff.

  • Who has access to what

  • Which subscriptions are we actually using

  • Why is this automation broken

  • How do we onboard someone to 12 tools in their first day without it being a disaster

Leadership got their hours back. Growth got their attention back.

The Job Nobody Writes a Description For

You don't need a $200K CTO to solve this. You need someone who owns three things:

1. The Vendor Stack. Every tool, every subscription, every integration. They know what talks to what and why. When something breaks, they fix it. When something's redundant, they kill it.

2. Access & Security. Who can see what. Who shouldn't. Onboarding a new hire's tool access in hours, not days. Offboarding someone without leaving zombie accounts everywhere.

3. The "Why Is This Broken" Queue. Every company has one. It's usually a Slack channel full of unanswered complaints, or worse, it lives in the CEO's DMs. Give someone ownership of that queue and watch how fast things improve.

Sreejith has evolved into doing many other things - and now has a team of four… but this is SUCH a great role that EVERYONE should hire for.

Yallah Habibi,
Jon