Fractional CTO

01 The Problem

You’ve got funding and need to turn an idea or early prototype into a real product. Every week you’re making technical decisions — architecture, hiring, vendors, infrastructure — and each one compounds.

You don’t need a full-time CTO yet. You need someone who’s made these decisions before and who can drop in temporarily.

The usual answer — hiring a consultant for a strategy session, getting a deck from an agency, or booking one-off advisory calls — doesn’t work. Real technical leadership requires context. It requires being in the room (or the Slack channel) when the decision is actually being made, not reconstructing it after the fact.

02 How I Work

I’m an independent contractor. No agency, no juniors, no handoffs. When you work with me, you get me.

• Quarterly retainer — a fixed block of hours, paid upfront. Use them or lose them, but that’s the cap and the commitment.
• Limited slots — I take on a small number of clients at a time. This isn’t a scaling business. It’s a craft.
• Embedded in your workflow — Slack, standups, PR reviews, architecture sessions, stakeholder discussions
• Remote and async by default — I believe in teams trusted to create value from anywhere
• No lock-in — you can stop anytime, and everything I build stays yours

03 What You Get

• Architecture reviews — evaluate your current and prepare for your future stack
• Hiring guidance — write job specs, screen candidates, design technical interviews
• Process design — CI/CD, code review, deployment, incident response
• AI strategy — identify where AI fits (and where it doesn’t) in your product

04 Why Me

I’ve spent 20+ years building software and products across startups and enterprises. I’ve been the first engineer, the tech lead, and the CTO. I’ve scaled teams, architected systems, and shipped products that people use.

05 Pricing

Quarterly retainer, paid upfront, fixed block of hours.

You’re not buying hours. You’re buying integration. Someone embedded in your team who learns the codebase, absorbs the constraints, and builds context over time — not someone who parachutes in for a call and disappears.

The best technical advice doesn’t come from a one-hour session. It comes from being embedded — seeing the cracks, understanding the context, and following through. One-off advisory calls have a whiff of “if we only had that insight, then…” Real change comes from deeper shared experience over time.

06 Fit Check

This is for you if:

• You’re a non-technical founder (or a technical founder who needs a sounding board)
• You’ve secured your first funding and are making foundational technical decisions
• You want someone who’ll tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear

This is not for you if:

• You need a full-time CTO (I can help you hire one)
• You want someone to manage your engineering team day-to-day
• You’re looking for a dev shop to build your product