Interview with Adam Meghji, Staircase Ventures Advisor and CTO

The Advisor Series – Featuring Adam Meghji

Staircase Ventures has an outstanding team of Advisors supporting our portfolio companies. In this blog series, we introduce you to our Advisors, share their stories, and highlight some of their insights and advice on building startups.

Introducing Adam Meghji!

Adam is a Toronto-based CTO, serial founder, and forward-deployed engineer who works with startups on product, engineering, and AI strategy. Over more than 30 years in technology, he has built and scaled companies through multiple waves of change. He co-founded Universe, which was acquired by Ticketmaster, and later co-founded Peggy, a contemporary art marketplace. Today, Adam works closely with founders and technical leaders to help them move faster and build with better leverage.

Q1. Tell us the highlights of your 30+ years building and scaling technology companies. What has it taught you?

I’ve always been obsessed with exploring innovations in tech, from the emergence of the Internet to mobile, cloud, blockchain, and now AI. As a founder, two big chapters for me were Universe and Peggy.

Universe taught me a lot about execution: product-market fit, timing, teams, and scale.

Peggy, a three-sided art marketplace in a challenging legacy industry, taught me a lot about strategy. We had to design a business model that aligned the incentives of all parties involved in the art market, which is notoriously hard to crack.

Q2. What lessons from your time building Peggy and Universe are most relevant to the founders and technical leaders you work with?

At Universe, early growth came from recognizing where demand was strongest and leaning into it. In the early days, we made a super difficult decision to amputate half the product, and double-down on what was actually growing, which was absolutely the right move. Shortly thereafter, a small engineering experiment grew into a key product innovation for the ticketing industry, and helped drive our acquisition by Live Nation.

When launching Peggy, we immediately focused on delivering a foundational innovation — the patented AI-based digital fingerprint to securely identify original paintings. With the art authentication problem solved, we were then able to layer on other industry firsts, like collector-to-collector resale, and designed key differentiators for our GTM strategy that artists, galleries, and collectors loved.

You can ship a ton of stuff, yet 2 or 3 key features might have an outsized impact on your success, so always be innovating and searching for them.

Q3. How has AI changed how and what you build day to day?

AI has changed the speed of building in a very real way. Work that used to take weeks can now happen in hours, sometimes minutes. That changes what is worth attempting, how teams are structured, and how quickly leaders can test ideas.

It also raises expectations. AI especially rewards people who can clearly articulate a vision. If you know what you want to build and why it matters, you can now turn that clarity into working output almost immediately. Teams can move faster, operators can get closer to the work, and companies can learn their way toward product-market fit and revenue more efficiently.

As a consequence, investors and boards are now expecting more progress, more traction, and higher velocity in general. Your competitors will be shipping faster than ever too. The acceleration provided by AI also comes with an increase in pressure.

Q4. How do founders and technical leaders ensure their teams are shipping quality and not just more in this new AI age?

Given the opportunities afforded by AI, there’s a temptation to just build, build, build. Remember, the goal here is to build a stronger product and healthier business. Clarity on what exactly you’re trying to achieve is critical, and follow through with a launch plan once it’s live.

That means being clear about what good looks like in the product, making fast feedback loops a habit, and using AI to remove friction so the team can spend more time on decisions that matter.

AI can quickly rack up feature and technical debt faster than human teams can. That said, vibe-coded prototypes are incredibly enabling too, so just ship responsibly.

Q5. What other advice do you have for early-stage founders and technical leaders?

Stay close to the customer, stay honest about what is creating momentum, and keep looking for leverage. Growth is everything, and at the rate things change right now, new tactics and opportunities are opening and closing all the time. Stay nimble so you can quickly lean in and strike when new tactics emerge, be quick to adapt when old ones expire.

AI tools are getting so good that you’re likely limited by your understanding of what’s possible rather than the tools themselves. Be curious and playful with frontier tools. You might discover new ways of getting things done that expand your mental frame that are applicable to your team’s challenges too.

Have fun solving real user problems and you won’t go wrong.