A CTO’s judgment. Not a CTO’s salary.
Most companies that think they need a CTO need about eight to ten days of one a month. You get the strategy, the hiring, and the hard calls, without a full-time executive you may not be ready to keep busy.
Four signals, not a hunch.
Decisions are getting expensive to reverse
Early on, everything is a weekend fix. Once you have real customers and real data, a bad architecture call can cost you a quarter to unwind.
You’re hiring engineers faster than you can judge them
The most expensive hires in the company, and no one in the room can tell an A-player from a confident talker.
Technology risk has become business risk
Security, uptime, the one senior dev who holds the whole system in their head. When a technical failure could end the company, leadership stops being optional.
Buyers are asking questions you can’t answer
Enterprise customers want to know about your security and architecture. Those conversations are stalling deals.
Notice what’s not on that list: “we raised money” and “competitors have a CTO.” Neither is a reason. If you’re not sure which camp you’re in, that’s a diagnosis, not a hire, I wrote about exactly that.
What the fractional seat covers.
Set the technical direction
What to build, what to buy, what to kill, sequenced against the business, not the backlog.
Hire and shape the team
Sit in the interviews that matter, design the org, find the two or three roles that unblock everything else.
Make the calls
Architecture, security, cloud spend, build-versus-buy. Fast, in writing, with the reasoning attached.
Carry the investor conversation
Be the credible technical voice in a diligence call or a board meeting when you need one.
A standing seat: a day or two a week, a real stake in the outcome, and a plan to make myself smaller over time.
Not sure it’s a CTO you need?
Half my calls end with ‘you need a lead, not a CTO’, and that saves you a year and a salary. Let’s find out which it is.