Fractional CTO

A CTO for the decisions that matter.

Most seed-stage companies don't need a full-time CTO. They need someone senior making the four or five calls a month that are expensive to get wrong — and standing behind them afterwards.

Your Team / Coverage ● retained
01 Architecture Calls
02 Hiring & Team
03 Vendor & Spend
04 Security & Compliance
05 Roadmap Tradeoffs
06 Board Narrative
Architecture Hiring Security Spend Board
What We Own

Not advice.
Ownership.

An advisor tells you what they'd do and leaves. This is the other thing — we make the call, put our name on it, and are still here when it plays out.

The Hard Calls

Rewrite or refactor. Build or buy. Monolith or split. Decisions get made, written down, and defended — not deferred to the next sprint.

Your Engineers

One-to-ones, code review standards, and technical mentoring for a team that's never had anyone senior to escalate to.

Hiring

Scope the role, write the brief, screen the candidates, run the technical loop. We sit on the other side of the table with you.

Spend

Cloud bills, tool sprawl, and contractor rates. Most seed-stage stacks have 30% of spend nobody has questioned in a year.

Risk

Security posture, compliance questionnaires, single points of failure, and the parts of the system only one person understands.

The Board Story

The technical section of the update, in language investors trust — written by someone who can answer the follow-up question.

How It Works

Three shapes,
depending on the gap.

Every engagement starts with the audit. What follows depends on what it finds — and there's no obligation for it to lead anywhere.
01 2 weeks

Audit

A fixed-scope read of your stack, team, and roadmap. Ends with a written findings doc and a prioritised list of what to fix first.

Best when you suspect something's wrong but can't name it.

02 4–8 weeks

Sprint

We embed to land one specific thing — a migration, a re-architecture, a compliance push, a first engineering hire.

Best when you know the problem and need it closed out.

03 Ongoing

Retainer

A standing day or two a week. Architecture review, team support, board prep, and someone to call when a decision can't wait.

Best when the gap is permanent until you hire a full-time CTO.

On Retainer

What lands
every month.

Retainers go bad when nobody can point at the output. These are the artefacts, and they arrive whether or not anything caught fire that month.

Decision Records

Every call written down, with the reasoning.

Architecture Review

Standing review of what's being built.

Team Support

One-to-ones and code review standards.

Spend Report

What you're paying for and what to cut.

Board Summary

Technical update, investor-ready.

The Gap

What's missing
without one.

A team can ship for a long time without senior technical leadership. The bill arrives later, usually during a raise or a rewrite.

× No one senior to escalate a technical decision to
A standing call and an answer inside the day
× Architecture decided by whoever argued hardest
Decisions written down, with the tradeoffs on record
× The board asks about scale and you improvise
A technical narrative you can defend under questioning
× First senior hire is a guess with a six-figure downside
Role scoped, loop designed, technical screen we run with you
Start With The Audit

Senior judgment, on retainer.

Two weeks, fixed scope, written findings. At the end you'll know what's actually wrong with your stack and your team — and whether you need us after that.