A CTO for the months before you hire one.
Part-time senior technical decisions, billed monthly, until your company is ready for a full-time CTO. You get an operator who has built and run products, invested in startups, and sat through the diligence calls you're about to face.
Six things a CTO does that you're currently doing without
Each one is a decision that's expensive to get wrong and hard to reverse. That's where part-time senior judgment pays for itself.
Technology strategy
A roadmap tied to revenue, a stack you can hire for, and a written build-or-buy answer for each big decision.
Architecture reviews
Find the places that will fail at scale before they do, and fix the critical ones first.
Hiring and mentoring
Job descriptions, technical interviews, and code reviews so your first engineers are the right ones. Need a whole team? See engineering team building.
Vendor calls
Independent recommendations. I don't resell anything and I don't take referral fees.
Security and compliance
Review of auth, secrets, backups, and access. The basics that investors and enterprise buyers will ask about.
Technical due diligence
A written code and infrastructure assessment before you raise or sell. I run this same diligence as an investor.
When people call me
- A decision that's costly to reverse. Rebuild vs. refactor. Which vendor. Which cloud. Whether to build the AI feature at all.
- A contractor who left a mess. Missed deadlines, unreadable code, or nobody left who understands the system.
- An investor question you couldn't answer. Security, scale, tech debt, or "who owns the code?" came up in diligence and the room went quiet.
- A first technical hire. You need someone to write the job description, run the interviews, and not get fooled.
When fractional makes sense
Fractional works for small teams, usually under 15–20 engineers, where you need senior judgment weekly but not a full-time salary. A full-time Series A CTO runs $250K+ plus equity.
Once you're past that size, or your product is the technology itself, hire full-time. I'll help you do it, and I'll tell you when the time has come.
Two tiers. Month to month.
No annual contract. No termination fee. Thirty days' notice either way.
Direction and a second opinion from someone who has made these calls before.
- Two working sessions per month
- Async access for questions between sessions
- Architecture, vendor, hiring, and build-or-buy calls
- Technical due diligence support when you raise
Everything in Advisor, plus hands in the repo.
- Weekly working sessions
- Priority async access, including Slack
- Hands-on review in your repos: PRs, design, security
- Pairing with your engineers on the hard paths
- 12-month roadmap work with leadership
Larger builds are quoted separately at a fixed price. See SaaS MVP development.
Questions founders ask first
What does a fractional CTO actually do?
Strategy, architecture review, mentoring, vendor evaluation, security oversight, and the CTO-level decisions you'd otherwise make alone or outsource to whoever is loudest in the room.
How much does it cost?
Two month-to-month tiers: Advisor at $5,000/month with two sessions plus async access, and Embedded at $9,000/month with weekly sessions, Slack, and hands-on repo work. No annual contract, no termination fee, 30 days' notice.
Fractional or full-time?
Fractional suits small teams that need senior judgment but not a full-time salary. Above roughly 15–20 engineers, or when the technology is the company, go full-time. I'll help you hire when that day comes.
Do you work remotely?
Most engagements are remote. On-site visits are available when they're worth the trip.
How is this different from your advisory retainer?
Advisory is narrower: it's focused on where technology and AI investments should go and the build-or-buy decisions around them. Fractional CTO covers the whole technical function, including people, security, and diligence. Pricing tiers are the same.
Does your investing work create conflicts?
I disclose any portfolio relationship up front and don't advise competitors of companies I've invested in. If you're a client and want to pitch the family office, that's a separate conversation with its own process.
Free 30-minute call
You'll get a recommendation whether or not you hire me.