Matías Alvarez Durán is the co-founder and chief executive of NaNLABS, the La Plata, Argentina, software engineering firm, and an engineer who now writes and speaks about how AI changes the way software teams work (CTO Colloquium; NaNLABS).
Starting NaNLABS in La Plata
NaNLABS was founded in 2013 by four developers who were tired of endless coding cycles with no room for creativity, and its name comes from the idea that people there are “Not a Number” (NaNLABS). After more than ten years building and leading the company, which has grown to about 70 people, he is steering its next stage toward AI-driven and real-time systems (CTO Colloquium; NaNLABS).
Writing about AI engineering
In his writing he argues that the lasting asset in AI work is the system around the model: “Two teams using the same underlying LLM will achieve vastly different outcomes based entirely on their AI coding infrastructure” (NaNLABS). He has also warned that many AI coding rules answer the limits of today’s models and should be reviewed as models improve: “None of those were bad decisions, they may just have an expiration condition” (NaNLABS).
In April 2026 he opened the 15th CTO Colloquium in Durham, North Carolina, with a talk on how technology leaders build teams that learn faster than the market (CTO Colloquium).