Fractional CTO · Startup Advisor

A second pair of eyes before the expensive mistakes.

— Strategic Clarity

I help seed and Series A founders avoid the technical and strategic missteps that quietly kill early-stage companies. I don't write your code. I don't take your equity. I work at the decision and governance level — across technology, product, and strategy as one system.

Hooded cyborg executive — visual mark for msawox
01 — Positioning

What a Fractional CTO Is — and what I am not.

Most early-stage technical wreckage comes from confusing these roles. Hire the wrong shape of help and you'll burn six months solving the wrong problem.

What it is

  • A part-time, outside technical decision-maker
  • Policy-level guidance — sanity-checking decisions before they're made
  • A holistic view across tech, product, and strategy

What I am not

  • Not a Senior Architect or Lead Developer — I don't design or own your system architecture
  • Not a Founding Engineer — I don't write your codebase
  • Not a Co-founder — no equity, no day-to-day operational ownership

My job is to stop you from making decisions that could kill the company — not to build the company for you.

02 — Focus & Ethics

High-stakes sectors. Ethical founders only.

Ethical startups only

No dark patterns. No predatory lending. No products that harm the users they depend on. If the business model needs people to lose for you to win, I'm not the right advisor.

Fintech

Regulatory exposure, trust-sensitive data, and partner dependencies make early technical and compliance choices unusually expensive to reverse.

Healthtech

Clinical validation, procurement realities, and patient-safety rules mean the wrong day-one architecture can quietly close every meaningful door.

03 — Services

Where I plug in — and what you get.

Fractional CTO Engagement

Part-time, ongoing technical leadership without a full-time hire. I operate at the decision and governance layer — technology strategy, vendor oversight, build-vs-buy calls, and keeping your technical direction aligned with your business model as you scale from seed to Series A.

Pre-Round Technical Due Diligence

A structured technical review of your stack, architecture decisions, security posture, and team structure — presented as an investor would see it. Identify the gaps before your investors do, and walk into your raise with the answers ready.

Technical Risk Audit

A systematic assessment of the decisions that could silently kill your company — over-engineered or under-engineered architecture, dangerous vendor dependencies, regulatory blind spots, and premature scaling commitments. Delivers a prioritized risk register, not a general report.

Technology Strategy & Roadmap

Translating your business objectives into a coherent, sequenced technical plan. Covers what to build, what to buy, what to defer, and in what order — structured around your funding runway and the stage you're actually at, not the stage you plan to be at.

Technical Hiring & Team Structure Advisory

Helping founders define the right technical roles at the right time — whether that's a lead engineer, a co-founder, or no technical hire yet. Includes role definition, seniority calibration, and interview criteria so you evaluate candidates against what the stage actually demands rather than a generic job description.

Regulatory & Compliance Readiness (Fintech & Healthtech)

Mapping the specific regulatory obligations your startup will face — KYC/AML, PSD2, HIPAA, MDR, or others depending on your market — and assessing how early your technical and operational decisions need to accommodate them. Targeted at Fintech and Healthtech startups in the EMEA region where regulatory exposure is unusually high and mistakes are unusually expensive.

04 — Lessons from Failure

Three startups. Three honest postmortems.

No testimonials. No invented wins. The credibility here is that I've already paid the tuition on the mistakes you're about to make.

AI Healthcare

Built the model before the path to clinical validation and hospital procurement was solved.

Lesson

Validate the regulatory and distribution path before the product.

Web3 Neobank

Anchored to token economics and speculative volume instead of durable banking infrastructure and compliance partnerships.

Lesson

A fintech product can't depend on the market staying excited.

Cybersecurity

Strong product sold into an SMB segment that couldn't sustain enterprise-length sales cycles or security budgets.

Lesson

Product quality doesn't substitute for knowing who can actually pay.

// Illustrative summaries — exact causes available on request.

05 — Free Strategic Tools

Decision-support tools, not tip sheets.

Each one is grounded in a named framework and produces a concrete output — a score, a checklist, or a specific next step. No email gate.

06 — Experience

Built before. Building now.

Three-time startup founder, currently building a new venture. A decade of R&D and product development experience, primarily across the EMEA region.

Before you ship the decision
you can't unship.

Strategy calls are application-only. I take on a small number of founders per quarter so the work stays honest.

Connect