Thomas Kolstø — CTO, Infrastructure Engineer & Founder

I’m a Norwegian CTO and serial entrepreneur, ~30 years into building infrastructure and software across Elixir, Linux, open source and security.

Working in the interface between business and technology, I provide context and turn business needs into tangible solutions — sometimes alone, mostly surrounded by a team smarter than me. Today I lead the technology side of Eyr Medical, a Scandinavian telemedicine platform serving patients across Norway, Denmark and Sweden.

I’ve co-founded five companies and worked at, for, or with many more — from the military to multi-national enterprises to a bootstrapped Silicon Valley startup operating out of a motel room. Across that career I’ve been through four acquisitions: Vorstack Corporation, the security startup I co-founded in 2011 in Silicon Valley, by ServiceNow in 2016; Adell Group AS, where I was CTO from 2009, by Upheads in 2016; Diptel AS, a VoIP provider I co-founded in 2003, by Telecomputing Norway in 2015; and most recently Eyr Medical, by Abel Health AS in 2026. Acquisitions taught me at least as much about what not to do as what works.

I started as a junior sysadmin at a Norwegian ISP in 1997, did a stint as a Unix operator for NATO at the Joint Warfare Centre, and have been building (and occasionally breaking) things across the stack ever since. My first CI pipeline ran Hudson, CVS and CFEngine in 1998 — I did DevOps before it had a name.

I write here when I have something worth measuring or worth saying. Mostly that means infrastructure, Elixir, Linux / Open source / security, and the realities of small teams shipping serious software.