Martina Zrnec

Co-founder & CTO of Stacklist writing on founder life, imposter syndrome, AI overwhelm, and building in public.

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The Hardest Page I Ever Built Was One Paragraph About Myself

We built Surfaces so nobody has to keep rebuilding a website they already stopped loving.

Martina ZrnecOct 12, 2026 · 5 min read

We benchmarked an 84% token reduction. Then we open sourced the protocol.
Building ACP, and sitting with the part we can't solve.
Oct 12, 2026 · 5 min read
I Keep Waiting to Wake Up
Sometimes the life you're living is the one you didn't think was yours.
Oct 12, 2026 · 3 min read
The Absurdity of Building Something That Matters
What do you call exhaustion that isn't from effort?
Oct 12, 2026 · 3 min read
Coverage Is Not Overlap
The decisions still get made. The conversations do not happen.
Oct 12, 2026 · 2 min read
A CTO diary: The Day the System Moved - and So Did I
How rebuilding our foundation rebuilt parts of me, and why I’d do it again without hesitation.
Oct 12, 2026 · 4 min read
Falling Into the AI Rabbit Hole (and Trying to Climb Out)
The Never-Ending Drop of "Game Changers"
Oct 12, 2026 · 3 min read
When Praise Feeds Doubt
[Feeling Like a Fraud (Even When You're Winning)]
Oct 12, 2026 · 2 min read

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Every article here lives in the Martina Zrnec: Founder & Builder Essays stack on Stacklist. Open the stack

About the author

I'm Martina, co-founder and CTO of Stacklist, building the Atomic Content Protocol: the knowledge layer for the AI-first web. Ten years shipping software, from Zagreb to New York. I write about the parts of building a startup nobody puts in the pitch deck.

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My AI Builder Stack

The tools, platforms, and infrastructure I rely on as an AI builder — from coding IDEs (Cursor, Windsurf) and AI models (OpenAI, Claude) to agent frameworks (LangChain, Hermes), deployment infra (Vercel, Railway, Daytona), data & search (Pinecone, Firecrawl, Jina, Apify), voice A

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Bonus: Martina Zrnec, Stacklist

This curated collection features Martina Zrnec, co-founder and CTO of Stacklist, offering a deep dive into her journey from a basketball player in Croatia to a prominent full-stack developer and tech entrepreneur. It includes podcast interviews, her professional profile, and details about Stacklist, a platform for organizing and sharing curated resources. This collection is ideal for aspiring startup founders, tech professionals, and anyone interested in entrepreneurship, content curation, or the career trajectory of a successful female leader in the tech industry.