Work with me
I currently have availability for consulting, advising, or fractional CTO engagements.
Nobody wants to hear it, but the startup journey comes with more offramps than happy endings. Once-promising ventures:
- invest too much in an unproven market
- spread resources too thin
- focus on the wrong things
- scale too much, too soon
- fail to scale to meet demand
- miss “next-level” technical expertise and leadership
- lack strategic, cross-functional alignment
Over the past two decades I’ve seen it all. And whether you needs help with acute challenges today or a firm foundation for tomorrow, I’d love to worth together to navigate the pitfalls and chart a path to success.
Experience
Throughout my time in the startup business, I’ve also had the good fortune to:
- hire hundreds of developers, managers, and leaders
- teach development, management, and ethics to thousands of students
- design, build, and ship products serving millions of end users
- scale globally-distributed engineering organizations
- lead multiple successful acquisitions
- manage multi-year plans and multi-million dollar budgets
- implement a range of security, risk, and compliance programs
When it comes to resolving urgent challenges or seizing new opportunities, that experience saves serious time and money.
How it works
Let’s make it as easy as possible:
- We schedule a confidential call to get introduced and scope the project
- We sign an agreement detailing the deliverables, timeline, and intention behind an engagement
- I deliver
In addition to the deliverables we’ve agreed on, you’ll get frequent (typically weekly) updates throughout the project as well as a final report at the conclusion of the engagement. And if we’ve agreed on co-marketing terms, we’ll work together beyond the completion of the project to showcase our collaboration and publicize the results.
Services
I can support your leadership team or individual managers in one of several operating models. We’ll talk options on our introductory call, but this typically involve some mix of:
- Consulting. We work together to address a specific organizational or technical challenge that’s holding your team back.
- Advising. We work on a recurring basis to grow the business and scale systems and people.
- Fractional CTO. I take on leadership responsibilities directly until you’re ready to hire a full-time leader
Consulting
Maybe it’s software quality, CI/CD performance, or preparing for an acquisition: there’s a problem holding you back, and you need it solved. With both deep technical abilities and “been there” in a variety of operating environments, chances are I’ve seen it before–and can help make it go away for good.
Advising
Situations arise! If you’re facing ongoing challenges or just need a sounding board as your business grows and role expands, I can lend both pattern recognition and an outside perspective to help you navigate growth successfully.
Fractional CTO
A fractional leader is just as valuable laying the right foundation for an early-stage venture as in smoothing over an existing leader’s departure.
Tapping my experience on a part-time basis helps founders and companies maintain strong technical direction until they’re ready to bring someone on full time.
FAQs
How do we measure success?
Successful engagements should:
- Massively accelerate your business’s trajectory
- Pay for themselves
If a project doesn’t have the potential to shave months or years off the time needed to get a product to market or double the size of a team, I’ll respectfully decline to take it on.
Likewise, the return on investment on every engagement should be material–if I don’t believe the value is there, that’s another no-go.
What does it cost?
We’ll settle on compensation based on the nature of the business and the engagement–and yes, equity’s on the table.
Philosophy
Shipping great software starts and ends with the people involved. If they’re trained, empowered, and aligned, good things happen–and no amount of technical wizardry will patch over the gap if they aren’t.
Every project is an opportunity to build skills and habits, and teaching teams to fish (so to speak) is a key part of any successful engagement.