A new Q&A with Zeke Arany-Lucas

It seems that every time I read the news recently there’s yet another article about space travel. The latest story that caught my attention focussed on an anonymous bidder who paid a staggering US$28m for the privilege of joining Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and his brother on an 11-minute flight into space, the company’s first carrying humans. Amazon’s Blue Origin is vying with other big-shot rocket men and their high-tech companies to lead the commercial space race, including Elon Musk, with SpaceX, and Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Galactic.

But what, you might be asking yourself, has this got to do with Forto?

Before you get too excited, Forto is not (yet!) planning to join this race to the stars, but it is, nevertheless, navigating its own astronomical growth trajectory that is unmatched by industry rivals. This is because it has a visionary leadership team who have successfully attracted both the commercial backing and the right people to make it soar.

Earlier this month, Forto has raised US$240m in funding, led by Softbank Vision Fund 2, bringing its valuation to over US$1.2 billion and making it one of Europe’s 75 highest valued private technology companies.

But even before the upstart in the logistics sector became the latest in a highly select list of tech unicorns, the company was already attracting some very serious, talented, and highly experienced people from other very serious tech companies.

The latest of these is Zeke Arany-Lucas. After 16 years of cutting-edge engineering work at Microsoft, and 10 years of engineering leadership at Amazon, Zeke joins Forto as its first senior principal engineer. In this interview, he talks about his biggest achievements to date (he’s got three patents to his name), what drives him as an engineer, why he joined Forto, and his stellar ambitions for the company’s engineering team.

What would you say is your career highlight so far?

When I moved to Berlin, I had heard that Berlin was going to be the tech engine of Europe. I can’t verify that status, but I am very proud of the work I did over the last 6 years building up multiple teams at the Amazon Development Center in Berlin. We started as a remote office with just a couple of small teams and became Amazon’s continental tech hub with more than 1,500 people.

And my original technology crush was really the idea of the world wide web, which I first saw with the 1994 NCSA Mosaic. People can laugh with me when I say my greatest highlight has to be joining the Internet Explorer 1.0 team in 1995, since it was the seed that grew into so many other experiences. I got to be in the center of a storm of changes that ran at “Internet time” and truly transformed the world. My origin story gives me perspective but has also sustained my passion in my endeavors since then.

What specifically attracted you to Forto?

It was definitely the people. Honestly, I hadn’t really noticed Forto until I saw that Kirill Tropin had moved to Berlin and joined in the middle of the pandemic. With Kirill’s experience, he could choose any company, so I thought to myself, “What does he know that I don’t?” I talked to him, and then Barzel, then Erik, and was just very impressed with their vision, passion, and eloquence about the opportunity.

And my impression still holds after being on the inside. The people are so authentic and passionate at every level. Especially about sustainability — it’s really inspiring!

Can you outline what your new position at Forto involves?

The accomplishments at Forto are a credit to both values and execution. When we are ambitious, keeping up with our own success is always a challenge. The successes that get us to one level may actually hold us back from the next level. How do we keep momentum on results while growing and taking on more scope? One answer is moving from relying on people with good intentions towards organizations with good mechanisms.

My focus is on keeping the effectiveness of the entire engineering organization while we scale up. I will extract and institutionalize mechanisms derived from the culture and best practices at Forto and blend them with my own diverse experiences to enable teams to be more independent and entrepreneurial. Good mechanisms solve a clear problem, have a slim cognitive overhead, implicitly create useful artifacts, don’t rely on specific individuals, consolidate redundancies, and balance investment with return. They have their own lifecycle separated from specific projects, and are designed to evolve with the company, even as participants and deliverables are changing.

Is there anything specific about this market that appeals to you?

It seems like it’s one of the few industries that hasn’t been turned upside down in the last 30 years, even while global trade has been on a continuous growth spurt. And the domain knowledge is just so broad, deep and critical to every other part of our economies. And I figure that anything to do with logistics has to get into hard core graph theory at some point.

What, in your opinion, are the key skills and attributes you are bringing to Forto?

Working at Microsoft and Amazon through multiple company scale sea-change events was a proving ground of how to use and evolve mechanisms to overcome challenges at these industry-leading companies. I have spent most of the last 15 years being a leader in organizations with 60–100 developers and over 40 nationalities. This is the sweet spot for getting Forto from where it is, to where it’s going.

What are your short-term and longer term goals at Forto?

The company is looking to double the number of engineers it currently has, so in the short term my focus is on scaling our engineering organization and individuals. This requires both supporting the growth of our existing talent and improving our hiring to attract new leaders in the industry.

I was pleased to join and find that the tech is currently in a good state for our business trajectory. This gives me a little more time to deeply understand our tech and product direction. By the end of the year, I expect to shift more focus to keeping the devs and our tech synchronized with our business and product teams while minimizing friction.

Forto is on a hiring spree and attracting many talented people from diverse backgrounds. What would you say to anyone reading this who is thinking about applying to the company?

I have a personal passion for the voice and experience of developers. In my life, I aspire to uplift in all interactions. I always seek to create high functioning teams from diverse backgrounds so that people are proud to play a role with their authentic selves. In my first weeks at Forto, I have been welcomed in a way that tells me that Forto is the right place for us to do this work.

Do you want to join Forto’s journey? Don’t hesitate to head over to our careers page to see all our open positions. We’re always looking forward to welcoming new tech enthusiasts.