CTO as a Service
You're the de facto CTO. You shouldn't be.
Every architecture call, every hire, every vendor decision, every investor question about the stack lands on your desk. Most aren't your fight. We embed as your fractional CTO 2 to 4 days a week, make the calls, run the engineering, and stay for outcomes, not handovers.
and inside every PADISO product. The problem
Sound familiar?
We hear the same five things from founders, scale-up CEOs and non-tech operators every week.
I'm the founder. I'm also the de facto CTO. Neither role is getting the time it needs.
Our last architecture call was made on vibes. Six months later we're rewriting the thing.
We need to hire engineers. We don't have the engineering judgment in the room to screen them.
We've burned six figures on the wrong vendor stack. Nobody on the team felt qualified to push back.
The board keeps asking about our tech roadmap and AI strategy. The answers are improvised every quarter.
What going without technical leadership actually costs.
Early architecture mistakes don't show up in the next sprint. They show up in the next round, in the next hire, in the next enterprise deal you can't close.
Of wasted build time when an early architecture call is wrong and nobody's qualified to call it out.
In wrong vendor commitments and bad first hires when there's no senior technical voice in the room.
Series A pitches that stall on technical due diligence when the tech story isn't board-ready.
Founder bandwidth. Every hour spent on tech is an hour not spent on customers, hiring or fundraising.
The fix
An embedded CTO who makes the calls and stays for the outcomes.
Not an advisor on a monthly call. Not a deck-and-disappear consultancy. We embed 2 to 4 days a week, sit in the standups, own the architecture decisions, run the hiring loops, and stay until the work has shipped and the team is set up to keep going without us.
On day one we audit the stack, the team and the roadmap. By week two you have a written technical strategy, a hiring plan, a vendor consolidation plan and an AI roadmap. By month one we're shipping against it, not just talking about it.
When the next board pack lands you'll have a technical narrative the room can defend, an architecture decision record for every meaningful call, and a CTO-shaped hole filled by someone who's done the job before.
What we run for you.
A working CTO does six jobs at once. We do them with you, not at you.
Technology Strategy
A written roadmap aligned to your funding stage, growth target and competitive position. Not generic advice, a plan you can defend to the board and execute Monday morning.
Architecture Decisions
We make the hard calls on stack, infrastructure and system design with a written ADR for every one. No more vibe-driven choices you'll rebuild in 18 months.
Engineering Hiring
Job descriptions, sourcing strategy, technical screening, interview loops and onboarding. We turn your first hires into a team that can ship without us.
Vendor Evaluation
Stop paying for the wrong tools. We evaluate, negotiate and consolidate the vendor stack so the bill goes down and the leverage goes up.
Investor & Board Readiness
Technical narratives for the deck, due diligence packs, ADRs for the data room, and the ability to hold the room when investors ask the hard architecture questions.
AI Strategy & Integration
Every product is now AI-native or losing ground. We identify the AI bets that matter, design the architecture and ship the integrations that move customer-visible metrics.
How the engagement runs.
Days per week embedded
Enough to be in the room for the decisions that matter, light enough to stay focused.
Month minimum engagement
Long enough to ship outcomes. Not so long you're locked into another agency relationship.
Founder and exec sync
Standing call with the founder or CEO. Async updates daily. Board pack contributions every cycle.
Knowledge transfer
ADRs, runbooks, hiring loops, vendor docs. When we wind down, your team owns it all.
Who this is for.
Pre-seed to Series A
You need technical leadership to make the right architecture calls and hire your first engineers. A full-time CTO hire is too early or too expensive. We fill the gap until you're ready to hire.
Growing scale-ups
The team is doubling, technical debt is compounding, and your founding engineer can't keep playing tech lead. We embed to set the standards, mentor the leads and protect the next 18 months.
Non-tech operators
You're a Health, Hotel, Retail or Logistics business building tech for the first time. You need a trusted technical partner to manage external teams, evaluate vendors and protect the investment.
Stop being the de facto CTO.
Book a 30-minute call. We'll tell you which decisions to take off your plate first and what 90 days of embedded CTO work would unlock.
Book a 30-min CTO call