About meThomas Kolstø
t.kolsto.no · linkedin.com/in/tkolsto · t.me/tkolsto
I’m a Norwegian CTO and serial entrepreneur, thirty years into building infrastructure, software and the teams that run them, with security as the thread through all of it.
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 technology and information security at Eyr Medical, a Scandinavian telemedicine platform serving patients across Norway, Denmark and Sweden, acquired by Abel Health in 2026.
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. Four of those companies were acquired; the ledger is below. 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 on 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, security, Elixir and Linux, and the realities of small teams shipping serious software in regulated industries.
headlines
Leadership
Two decades of leading development teams and infrastructure projects — in-house, contractors, remote, and increasingly AI agents. The most important thing I did as CTO was show up for the team every day, through the good days and the hard ones. Make the work legible, make deployments boring, and people stay.
Security
From NATO Unix rooms and classified-network gateways to a threat-intelligence startup and health data for patients in three countries. Security is a property of how a team works, not a department you send tickets to. Most of it is unglamorous: identity done properly, patching done on time, and knowing exactly where the data lives.
Engineering
Nearly 30 years of keeping servers alive, from hand-racked hardware to Kubernetes. Did DevOps before it had a name — CVS and CFEngine in 1998. Code that makes infrastructure do what it's told is still my favourite kind. I still read the code my teams ship; a CTO who can't is managing rumours.