How Toufic Boubez Built 5 Startups Without Taking the Top Seat
When you think about startup founders, you might picture a charismatic CEO pacing the stage at a conference or charming investors on a pitch call. But that’s only one way to lead. For Toufic Boubez, five-time founder, seasoned CTO, and culture-first operator, the top seat never held much appeal.
Toufic’s journey, shared recently on the Signal to Noise podcast, hosted by our Managing Partner at Riviera Partners, Eóin O’Toole, is a masterclass in building resilient startups by choosing the right seats, the right co-founders, and the right values to hold onto when the pressure mounts.
From early-stage uncertainty to remote-first culture, principled tech bets, and the human side of leadership, Toufic’s perspective is a timely reminder that the founder’s job is evolving just as fast as the tech we build.
Let’s unpack how he’s done it five times over without ever needing to slap a CEO on his door.
The Co-Founder Who Avoids Being CEO
One thing to know about Toufic? “I avoid being CEO like the plague. It’s a thankless job,” he pointed out.
Instead, Toufic has repeatedly stepped into the CTO or CPO role, the technical heart of each venture, while leaving the top executive responsibilities to partners who complement his skillset and leadership style.
For Toufic, the secret isn’t just about avoiding the burden of a CEO’s tasks; it’s about playing to his own strengths and finding a co-founder who brings equally strong but different traits to the table. And that’s where his real focus lands: finding a co-founder who aligns with values, not just skills.
“Culture, culture, culture,” he says. “A lot of people go looking for a co-founder like they’re filling out a skills matrix. But for me, what trumps all that is alignment on culture and values.”
High-Trust Partnerships Start with Intentional Vetting
One of the best illustrations of Toufic’s approach is how he met his current co-founder at Catio. In their first meeting, they both pulled out the same Simon Sinek video about Navy SEALs selecting teammates based on high trust over high competence.
“That clicked for both of us,” Toufic said. “If you don’t have trust, nothing else matters. You’re going to be deep in the trenches together, you’ll argue, you’ll be stressed, and if your cultures aren’t in alignment, it’s a recipe for disaster.”
And trust, for Toufic, doesn’t just mean good vibes. It means knowing your co-founder as a whole human, beyond the work context. What’s affecting their life outside the company? Where do they draw the line between personal and professional resilience?
Considering so many founders rush these courtships, Toufic’s advice is clear: spend time, build trust, and treat co-founder selection with the same care you’d expect your team to bring to every decision.
Architecting for Uncertainty
Another theme Toufic comes back to again and again: change is constant. In startup life, what you build on day one will almost certainly need to pivot by day 100.
His favorite analogy? The cone of uncertainty. You might have clear assumptions at the start, but that cone widens the further you go. So, your architecture, your roadmap, and your hiring need to flex with it.
At Catio, this mindset guided them through significant technical shifts, including being among the first to build actual multi-agent AI systems before that was even a buzzword.
The key? Principled thinking, Toufic says. “We ask: What is the real problem? What are our best options? We research and validate, then make decisions as a team.”
And AI has changed the game even further. Where integrations might have taken months to build out a few years ago, today’s AI copilots churn them out in hours. Toufic expects every engineer on his team to work with these tools, not as replacements, but as skill multipliers.
When Leadership Means Hard Calls
If you’ve ever led a team, you know the hardest moments rarely come from product pivots or market shifts. They come from people’s decisions. Toufic doesn’t mince words here:
“The hardest thing for me is letting someone go. But you have to do it. You have to do it with respect, and you have to do it quickly. If you don’t, it drags the whole team down.”
To support this, he builds self-healing, self-organizing teams.
Performance isn’t measured in isolated individual OKRs but at the team level. Underperformers become obvious, and the team self-corrects, a mechanism that preserves culture and trust, his twin non-negotiables.
And as the team grows, so does the need to layer in the right leadership at the right time.
“When I start spending more time on process than actually moving the business forward, that’s a strong cue for me that the organization has outgrown its current structure. You do need leaders to come and specialize at that stage. You can’t brute force your way through it.”
Final Thoughts
What makes a great leader in a single word? “Integrity. Without it, nothing else holds up.”
So why does someone who’s built five companies shy away from the CEO title? Because he knows his superpower: guiding technology, architecting for change, and building high-trust cultures that do what strategies alone can’t.
The result? Startups that don’t just survive hype cycles but stay resilient, adaptable, and worth working for, no matter where Toufic sits.
Toufic’s Background
Toufic Boubez is the Co-founder and CTO of Catio, a cloud architecture platform specializing in tech stack evaluation, planning, and evolution. With over 20 years of experience in machine learning and AI, he has pioneered several innovative technologies throughout his career. Toufic is a serial entrepreneur with three successful exits, having founded and served as CTO at Metafor Software (acquired by Splunk), Layer 7 Technologies (acquired by Computer Associates), and Saffron Technology (acquired by Intel). With a strong foundation in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and a background at IBM as the Chief Architect for SOA, Toufic has been a key influencer in the development of technology standards and has authored numerous publications.
Listen now: Signal to Noise Episode 3: How Toufic Boubez Built 5 Startups Without Taking the Top Seat
