Fractional CTO
Build first.
Hire later.
I ship products for startups. You get architecture, code, and technical leadership — without building a team.
Fractional CTO
I ship products for startups. You get architecture, code, and technical leadership — without building a team.
The problem
Most startups burn through their first six months trying to build a tech team before they've built a product.
A full-time CTO costs $250K+ before they write a line of code. Agencies charge six figures for a prototype and hand you a codebase nobody can maintain. And that offshore team you found on a freelancer platform? They'll build exactly what you asked for — which is never quite what you needed.
Meanwhile, your competitors shipped last month.
There's a simpler model: hire one senior technical person who architects, builds, and ships — and who has enough skin in the game to care whether it works.
Services
Every engagement is different. Pick the model that fits your stage, or we'll figure out the right combination together.
Monthly retainer + equity
Your technical co-founder — without giving up half your company. I embed in your team as CTO. I make architecture decisions, write production code, review pull requests, and hire developers when you need them.
Best for: Pre-seed to Series A startups that need a senior technical leader who builds, not just advises.
A few hours per day
Your team has builders. They need an architect. I design your system, review your code, and set the technical direction. Your developers handle implementation under my guidance.
Best for: Companies that have developers but lack senior technical leadership.
My network, your roadmap
I source and manage developers from my network in Vietnam. I handle recruitment, onboarding, technical direction, and quality control. You get a fully managed dev capability.
Best for: Projects that need more capacity than one person can provide.
Approach
Four principles that shape every engagement. No exceptions.
We define what we're building before we build it. Data models, user flows, API boundaries, deployment strategy. I've seen too many startups burn money rebuilding something that was never properly designed.
Supabase, Vercel, Stripe, established auth providers. The best technology is the one everyone else has already debugged. I'm not going to use your runway to beta-test someone else's framework.
I run a system of specialised AI agents under my direction — architect, designer, executor, reviewer. Think of it like a construction site: I'm the foreman, the AI is the crew. The architecture and quality bar are mine. The speed isn't something a solo human can match.
You'll understand every technical decision and why it was made. No black boxes. No jargon as a substitute for clarity. If I can't explain a decision simply, I haven't thought about it enough.
Track Record
Full platform with candidate profiles, admin portal, agreement flows, and AI-powered job description generation. 1,000+ candidates onboarded.
Citizen dashboard, interactive world map, event integration, and profile system for a 400-member global digital nation.
MVP for a climate-tech startup tracking carbon credits from mangrove habitat rehabilitation in Australia. Ethereum smart contracts with on-chain field measurements and decentralised storage for full provenance.
Research platform for investors to discover, compare, and track fintech companies — funding rounds, company profiles, competitive landscape. Led a team of 20+ developers as fractional CTO.
Side Projects
Not everything has to be a startup. Some of the most interesting things I've built were just because I wanted to.
Udemy Course · 27,000+ students
Complete course on building interactive data visualisations with D3.js. From bar charts to force-directed graphs.
Free Coding Bootcamp · 400+ students
Free learn-to-code programme. Two cohorts of ~200 students each, teaching web development fundamentals from scratch.
Parody Personality Test
A tongue-in-cheek MBTI-style personality test for dark personality traits. Because not every side project needs to be serious.
About
I've been working as a fractional CTO since 2021, helping early-stage startups get from an idea to a working product.
My background is in economics, not computer science. That shapes everything about how I approach technology: every technical decision is a business decision. I don't reach for the newest framework because it's exciting — I use whatever gets you to market fastest with the least risk.
Over the past five years I've built products across Singapore, Vietnam, Australia, and the UK. I've managed remote development teams, run technical due diligence, and shipped production code for companies ranging from pre-revenue startups to funded scale-ups.
In 2025, I rebuilt my entire workflow around AI-first development. Not because it's fashionable — because the economics changed. One person with the right process and the right tools can now deliver what used to take a five-person team. I've structured my whole practice around that shift.
Based in Sydney, Australia. Originally from York, UK.