Ourovoros Welcome Post

Welcome to our Substack! 

This blog serves as the grounds for documenting and publishing the operational methods of balena.io, an IoT platform for building, deploying and managing fleets of connected Linux devices. 

It is maintained by Alex Marinos, CEO of balena, and George Hristov, a balena team member.

Welcome to balena

Why are we documenting the operations of balena, you may ask? 

Balena is a very unique company. Over the past 9 years, we have not only created one of the most robust platforms for fleet management on the edge, we’ve done it while assembling a novel, responsive organizational structure from the ground-up. 

We believe that traditional organizational scaling is broken, and that, through creating our own internal structure from scratch, we’re uniquely attuned to a number of alternative ways to organize collective action that eliminate the bloat, bureaucracy, and internal inefficiencies most scaling companies face. 

This is a big claim, and this Substack is our bid at sharing that thinking with the world. Our goal is to get feedback on our existing methods and to start a broader conversation about issues in our civilization caused by the broken methods of traditional organizational thinking, so that we can work towards viable alternatives. 

To learn more, check out our first post: The Methods and Motivations of Balena’s Organizational Structure.

PS, about the name: 

“Ourovoros” is derived from the word “Ouroboros”, but with a “v” instead of a “b”, as is the original pronunciation in Greek. An ouroboros is an ancient symbol, usually depicted as a serpent eating its tail. We like the cyclical imagery, as the idea of a “loop”, and self-referencing processes are core to our organizational thinking.