Work With Me

Most fractional CTOs are former software engineers who've been around long enough to have opinions. That's fine for some problems. My background is different.

I co-founded Upverter (YC W11) and ran it from zero through an acquisition by Altium. Then spent four years at Sheertex building a 30+ person engineering org from scratch across software, automation, controls, and materials. I've designed PCB tooling, built production automation systems, stood up cloud infrastructure, and I'm currently building multi-agent AI products.

Most technical problems aren't purely software. Most advisors are.

What I do with early-stage companies is different depending on what you actually need. For some founders that's architecture decisions and hiring. For others it's more hands-on than that.

I'll write the code. Build the product. Talk to your customers. Work through product market fit with you. If you're at the stage where the founding team needs another person in the room who can do the work, not just comment on it, that's something I do.

When you're further along, it shifts. I'll help you pick the right stack before you're locked into the wrong one. Set the hiring bar and figure out what org structure looks like before it becomes bureaucracy. If you're raising or getting acquired, I can be the person who looks under the hood for your investors. And when your board asks hard technical questions, I'll help you translate the answer into something they can act on.

I work embedded. Slack, standups, actual code reviews when it matters. Not a monthly call and a slide deck.

You've raised. You're growing. And the engineering org is starting to crack under the weight of it.

Velocity is dropping as the codebase grows. The team that got you here isn't structured for where you're going. Architecture decisions made at seed are now load-bearing walls nobody wants to touch. Your CTO is stretched thin, or you don't have one, or you're not sure they've done this before at this scale.

This is a pattern. It happens at almost every company that grows fast enough. And it's fixable.

What it looks like depends on the company. Sometimes it's a focused architecture review. What's actually broken, what's fine for now, and what to fix first. Sometimes it's helping a technical founder build their first real engineering org. Sometimes it's sitting alongside a CTO who's great at building product but hasn't scaled a team before.

I've done both sides of this. The founder building fast and the exec making it last. That's what makes this work different from a consultant who reads your codebase for a week and hands you a PDF.

Some companies need an intensive sprint to diagnose what's broken and prioritize the fix. Others need ongoing embedded support across a 12 to 18 month scaling phase. I scope it based on what you actually need.

If your engineering org is becoming the bottleneck, that's where I start.