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 developers
• Why MCPs didn't invent anything new, and the missing layer that transfers intent instead of commands
• Why nothing performs well past 100k tokens despite 1M context windows
• The decision log: AI's most underrated asset inside a company
• Bootstrapping Foody from phone orders and cash payments to a national exit
• Compressing hiring from 3 weeks to 1 day with 30,000 applications a year
• The 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