About

Pragmatic builder-operator CTO. Player-coach.

Pronounced Ah Boo Ko Nay. The accent on the é in Koné carries the “nay” sound, the way it’s said in Côte d’Ivoire and across francophone West Africa.

I’m Abou Koné. Today I’m CTO at Pacify, a HIPAA telehealth platform. I joined in November 2024 to build the first internal engineering organization after the company spent its early years on fully outsourced vendors. We rebuilt the team, the stack, and the operating cadence from scratch.

Before Pacify I was at Clockwise (calendar AI), ShopRunner (e-commerce, FedEx subsidiary), and IDDataWeb (identity verification). My career started in front-end architecture; over the last decade I’ve moved into platform leadership, agentic-coding workflows, and engineering organization design.

Outside the day job: I host TecPatri, a long-form podcast on the African tech diaspora. I run consulting through 100Kode. I build side projects, currently Sabati (writing productivity) and Vibe Coding Profiler (open-source dev profile that reads your Git history). Earlier ventures include Coders4Africa and Gebeya.

I publish essays on Medium, longer-form on Substack, shorter technical posts on dev.to, and operator-audience articles on LinkedIn. Recent pieces are surfaced on /writing/.

Mentoring

A lot of developers reach out — career questions, code reviews, architecture sanity checks, “should I take this job” calls. I take those conversations whenever I can. Always free, always 1:1, no agenda beyond helping someone get unstuck. If that’s you, say hi.

How I work

• Player-coach by default. Architecture, hiring, and code review on the same week.
• Agentic-coding daily. Cursor, Claude Code, Codex are part of my toolchain, not novelties.
• Bias toward shipping legible systems over clever ones.
• Bilingual operator. English and French, North America and West Africa.

Currently

Open to senior tech-leadership conversations, especially with operators relocating capital and product back to the continent. Get in touch.