George Hadjivarnava: Founding Foody, and building AI at Terra

George Hadjivarnava co-founded Foody as CTO with no VC money, made it profitable in under 2 years, and sold it to Delivery Hero in the biggest tech acquisition in Cyprus.Scaling through COVID from restaurant menus to full supermarkets, total downtime: 45 minutes.Now he leads engineering strategy at Terra and he believes the next infrastructure layer won't be built for developers at all.Why in two years 90% of Terra's customers will be agents instead of developersWhy MCPs didn't invent anything new, and the missing layer that transfers intent instead of commandsWhy nothing performs well past 100k tokens despite 1M context windowsThe decision log: AI's most underrated asset inside a companyBootstrapping Foody from phone orders and cash payments to a national exitCompressing hiring from 3 weeks to 1 day with 30,000 applications a yearThe 24/7 AI health system: even a billionaire's team of doctors goes to sleep(0:00) Intro(1:30) Startup ecosystem in Cyprus: more incubators than startups(7:20) Why ecosystems compound(23:00) Flunking Imperial and building websites to pay rent(29:00) Foody's first version: phone orders, cash only(39:35) The Delivery Hero acquisition and COVID scaling(43:05) 45 minutes of total downtime(44:45) You can one-shot an app. You can't one-shot 100M users(50:25) Joining Terra(56:40) The missing agent layer: intent, not commands(1:02:50) The 24/7 AI health system(1:09:35) The 90% agents prediction(1:11:05) Hiring compressed from 3 weeks to 1 day(1:15:35) The decision log: building a company brain(1:19:10) Why 1M context windows are marketing(1:26:35) Three changes to become a real technology hub