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.
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.
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 — 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.
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.
04 — 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.
Startup Technical Risk Score
Four-axis questionnaire → 0–100 risk score, adapted from TRL logic.
Seed / Series A Technical DD Checklist
What investors actually look for. Tick what you have, surface what you don't.
Founder-Market Fit Self-Assessment
Six questions. An honest score on whether you're the right founder for this problem.
Co-founder vs. Lead Engineer vs. Fractional CTO
A decision tree for figuring out which kind of technical help you actually need.
Build vs. Buy vs. Partner Matrix
Classic make-or-buy framework applied to early-stage tech and vendor decisions.
Ethical Factor Score Card
A five-axis questionnaire grounded in the B Impact Assessment's stakeholder model, scored out of 10.
05 — 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.