James Yorston

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10 years in technology most recently as Director of Engineering, VC at Carta

I've got a background in a number of sectors including FinTech, E-Commerce and Academic Research.

LinkedIn, X, GitHub

💻 Open Source

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2024 in Review: Unbecoming a CTO, Joining Carta and What I’ve Learned

Summary overview

2024 was overall a very good year for me, but one that started with quite a lot of mixed emotions.

If you had asked me 11 years ago, as I was shipping my first android app from my bedroom, what my ultimate career goal was, I would have said “found a company and be the CTO”. So perhaps strange then, that I moved on from my CTO role at Zero Gravity, where I had joined as staff member #3, scaled the business, design, product and engineering teams and then left to join Carta. This was an exceptionally difficult decision, more on this later!

What I can say is that I have ended 2024 very happy, I feel I have achieved a lot personally and professionally, which the further I get into my career, is really the only thing that matters for me.

Work Goals

UK & Startup Economy

I’ll preface this by briefly discussing the state of the UK and startup economy. As my X bio states I am a “serial startup guy”. For the last 11 years I have worked exclusively in tech startups & scaleups. H2 of 2023 and early 2024 was the most challenging economy I have experienced to build and scale a startup. Particularly in the UK, as the chickens came home to roost with rampant inflation, loss of talent from Brexit, drop in VC funding, amongst many other macro issues. It seemed scaling startups were those suffering the most. I saw more businesses folding in this period than I have ever seen before.

My outlook on London, as the best place to build your startup outside of the US, also waned in this time, the universal truth that has been the case for probably >50 years that certainly, as a European, London is the best place to find a job/start a business seemed to really be unravelling. Domestic and global talent were simply choosing to move elsewhere for their ventures due to the prohibitive cost of living here. Without being too political, the UK now has a new government, there seems to be some sense of stability here, let’s see if we can get back on the path to growth.

Zero Gravity

Zero Gravity endured all of these macro issues (one might say due to savvy management, of which I would toot my own horn and say I played some small part in) and the team are still doing exceptionally well. I still regularly hang out with the crew, and am still very proud of my time in that business and their mission to level up the whole of the UK education and early careers sector.

To that end, the first goal I am really pleased with is that my 2024 Zero Gravity mentee Mahdi secured at place at Kings College London to study Computer Science. Helping the next generation of software engineers has always been something I’ve been passionate about, but what my Zero Gravity experience taught me this year, is that I am probably now too out of touch with the university/college admissions process to offer as much value as I once could. So instead I will transition my Zero Gravity account to a career mentor account and help engineers early in their career, where my experiences are far more recent. If you are interested in mentoring early career engineers in the UK, then you too can do so here Mentor Signup.

Unbecoming a CTO

Next, I joined Carta as Director of Engineering for International. Many people asked me, including the team I took over at Carta, why I would leave a startup I helped build from the ground up, that was well funded, to join for a lesser position in a larger organisation. Good question!

Indeed, my own 20 year old self would have said surely I was already living the ultimate dream? In many senses yes and many senses no.

Senior Engineering roles take on quite different forms depending on the stage of the business. I have held the title of HoE/CTO/DoE now for 6 years. There have been a lot of differences in what I was actually doing in all of those roles.

Zero Gravity was at the stage of a startup whereby I had to do everything I really liked doing, and also a lot of what I really did not like doing. This is no fault of anyone, merely a fact of business and growing pains. To give an example of things that I had to do but really didn’t enjoy doing.

The client due diligence was particularly painful as we were selling an awful lot, and our customers were exclusively mega-enterprise clients i.e. global banks. This meant that the volume of work for each client was enormous, and we weren’t yet at the point that hiring specifically for this role was worth it. Even though I did not enjoy this, I was surprisingly good at it and we always passed with flying colours, I’m still pleased with the dashboard I helped setup to help optimise my time here: security.zerogravity.co.uk. As an aside, I would definitely recommend Safebase as a product if you are having similar challenges.

So, what parts of the (startup) CTO job did I enjoy the most:

Lets hone in on the last point there, as you will see in my personal goals section, if I am motivated by anything, it’s “seeing all there is to see”, I think this manifested in my decision to join Carta, but I will attempt to talk through my wider thinking as to why I think this was a good career move.

Joining Carta

I joined Carta in April 24, as Director of Engineering for the International Fund Administration business (quite a mouthful). Why did I join?

Well, firstly, I had some mutual connections at Carta, and was aware of what they were doing, particularly in the UK and Europe. With all of my experience of helping to fund raise for my own startups and the fact that I’ve been part of a PE buyout before, I think I had a good base set of knowledge as to how VC & PE works, and therefore felt like I could be useful in growing the business and product outside of the US.

Additionally, I have always seen VC as a force of good, as someone whose entire career has been built on the back of VC funding, I know first hand how it can accelerate great businesses and great people faster than they would have been able to achieve on their own.

Secondly, as I gazed deep into the recesses of my own profile and experiences, I had experienced all of the stages of the startup/scaleup lifecycle apart from the final stage. Pre-IPO. (See New Experiences )

This is the stage Carta is at, and it comes with a host of different types of challenges. I was unsure of whether I would 100% enjoy this stage prior to joining, but over the past 8 months I’ve learned I very much do, principally because the business is large enough to allow me to focus on the areas I excel at, without having to get too bogged down in ‘side-quests’ as often would be the case in an earlier stage company. There is great satisfaction in bringing together strategies that have had >100 people work on it and seeing the results.

Next, it is not actually dissimilar to the roles I have had before, as the International business is it’s “own” thing, I still have a lot of freedom in the day to day and decision making, which works very well for me, it feels like a startup within a startup which is inline with what I am best at and have proved that I can do.

Finally, the exposure to Silicon Valley engineering and product (which in my view is still the benchmark), and all of the very talented, driven and smart people that come with that. Everyone I work with at Carta are really, very impressive individuals.

So, in conclusion, this move allowed me to see the final stage of the startup lifecycle, which I had not experienced before. In my other roles I had either left in the growth stages or been acquired and done the work to integrate into the acquirer. This is fundamentally why I have ended the year in a very happy place, the learning opportunity is vast, Carta is in an incredibly complex domain, and the future upside is huge. All the best parts of building companies, in my humble opinion.

With all that said, was it still hard to leave Zero Gravity? Yes, without question. I agonised over it for a long time, and the thinking behind it took probably 3 months to materialise in my head. I realised however, that my principal attachment was more emotional, to the people and the mission, rather than practical. I look back upon my 3 years, and my first CTO role very fondly.

Personal Goals

As mentioned my main life motivator is “Seeing all there is to see”, I take that literally with my main activity outside of work being travel.

This year, I traveled to 4 new countries, bringing my total to now 42. One of those new countries,was Carta sponsored (Singapore), I spent time visiting our APAC HQ as my team is responsible for this region as well. Singapore is a really great place, I didn’t know anything about it previously, but the quality of life the average Singaporean has is far higher than in the UK, I loved the tropical climate, the people, the food, and the fact that such a big city has a great beach 10 mins drive from the center.

New Countries:

I also experienced a lot of new cities or regions/islands of countries I had visited before. Notable highlights:

San Francisco was also Carta sponsored, and was a big personal goal of mine to visit. Silicon Valley is the global centre of startups and technology. The drive of Silicon Valley is evident as soon as you jump off the plane. I am not kidding when I say my uber driver pitched me on his movie data startup during the 30 min ride to my hotel. This is something that would simply never happen in the UK, and I am of the opinion that this is exactly why the US still outperforms everywhere else. The entrepreneurial growth culture is deeply ingrained in the American psyche. This is something Europe can learn from.

Reading

I have read considerably less this year than in previous years. This is almost exclusively down to time constraints in my day to day life. My reading was also less broad than usual, and was typically for a specific purpose (getting better at my job), with a significant drop in reading purely for pleasure. In 2025 I’d like to get my reading back up to my average of one book a month or so.

Overall, I would recommend all of these books, but perhaps surprisingly, I really enjoyed VC: An American History, as it covers such a range of topics that I am personally interested in; History, Entrepreneurship, Economics and Technology.

Pictures

Isle of Wight, view of the coast Isle of Wight

Top of the mountains in Val Thorens Val Thorens

Joining Carta! Joining Carta

Hilltop churches in Georgia’s Kazbegi Region Georgia

San Francisco San Francisco San Francisco

Singapore Singapore