Fractional CTO

Some companies need a senior technical voice in the room every week without a full-time CTO on the payroll. That is what this is. I sit on your side of the table for architecture, AI strategy, vendor choices and hiring, and I stay long enough to be accountable for how those decisions turn out rather than handing over an opinion and leaving.

It runs as a monthly retainer. What you are buying is a rhythm rather than a document: weekly working sessions, ownership of the technical roadmap between them, and someone reachable when a decision cannot wait a week.

• 01

  Weekly working sessions with you and whoever else needs to be in the room that week

• 02

  Architecture and roadmap ownership, so one person is accountable for the shape of the system rather than three people half-owning it

• 03

  Vendor and hiring evaluation: what to buy, what to skip, who to hire and what to ask them

• 04

  Direct async access in between, so a decision does not sit for six days waiting for the next call

What is not included is hands-on delivery at volume. I will prototype to settle an argument, read your code and review your team’s work, but if the plan calls for weeks of implementation that belongs with your engineers or with an Automation Build Sprint, and my job is to make sure it is the right thing being built.

Founders and operations leads carrying technical decisions they would rather not make alone. It fits where those decisions are frequent and expensive, the stack is growing faster than anyone is steering it, and the volume of hands-on work does not yet justify a full-time hire.

It is the wrong choice if what you need is someone building. A fractional arrangement gives you judgement, not capacity, and a team that needs full-time hands-on delivery will be frustrated by an advisor no matter how good the advice is. Hire in-house for that, or scope the work as a build sprint. It is also the wrong starting point if you do not yet know which problems are worth solving with software, which is what the AI Ops Audit is for. I will say so on the call if that is what I think.

The technical half of this is the part people expect. The other half is having sat in the operational and board seats being advised, which changes what advice is worth.

Concretely: I am CTO and co-founder of Crumbless.ai. Before that I ran institutional operations at Celsius Network, a $10B AUM platform, where I personally negotiated over $1B in loans. I founded Bitquinox, an OTC desk that settled more than 3,000 trades. I was COO of DATE&GAME, covering treasury, compliance and investor relations. So when the question is whether a control is worth the friction, or what a lender or an investor will actually ask, that is not a hypothetical for me.