Senior CTO help for founder-led SaaS, by the hour or by the package.
I have taken engineering teams from a handful of people to $170M in revenue, through SOC 2, acquisitions and turnarounds. Now I do that work for founders who are not ready for a full-time CTO.
Loch Vale photograph to come
Under 8 months
SOC 2 Type 2, from zero to attestation
55% → 90%+
roadmap delivered as promised, with a 20% leaner team
$72M → $170M
revenue growth as CTO through an $800M transaction
5 years late → on time
a federal aviation program turned around in two years
The four walls
Founders call me when they hit one of these.
A customer is asking for SOC 2.
Your first enterprise deal is waiting on a security questionnaire or an audit you have never been through. I have run this program from nothing to a Type 2 report in under eight months, and I know which shortcuts cost you later.
Security & compliance →Engineering ships, but nobody can say when.
The roadmap slips, the board asks why, and your engineers are working harder than ever. I rebuild the planning and delivery cadence so the team ships what it said it would, then hand it back to you.
Delivery & operating cadence →You need your first engineering leader.
Hiring a VP of Engineering when you are not one is the most expensive hire to get wrong. I define the role, run the search with you, build the interview loop and help you close.
First engineering leader →An agency is building your product and you cannot tell if it is going well.
You are paying an outside team and taking their word for it. I review the scope and the code, sit in the weekly delivery meeting on your side of the table, and tell you plainly what is happening.
Build partner oversight →How I work
By the hour, or by the package. Never a retainer.
Hours
Prepaid blocks of hours for anything without a fixed scope: an architecture decision, a board deck, a vendor negotiation, coaching your engineering lead. You use them when you need them.
Packages
Fixed scope, fixed timeline, fixed fee, agreed before we start: a technology and security review, a SOC 2 sprint, an engineering-leader search. You know the cost on day one.
Handoff
Every engagement ends with a written handoff. The point is that your company can run without me, not that it depends on me.
Where I have done this
Nearly twenty years of running engineering, most of it as the CTO.
I was CTO of DiscoverOrg through its growth from $72M to $170M and its $800M combination with ZoomInfo, CTO of Datassential through a $35M acquisition and the retirement of two products that were quietly losing money, and CTO of Seamless.AI, where we earned SOC 2 Type 2 in under eight months and took roadmap accuracy from about 55% to over 90% with a smaller team. Before that I led the turnaround of an FAA program that was five years behind. I have hired, and occasionally un-hired, engineering leaders for over a decade.
CTO · DiscoverOrg / ZoomInfoCTO · Seamless.AICTO · Datassential
This is for you if
You are the founder and CEO of a SaaS company with somewhere between one and twenty-five engineers. You are pre-seed, seed, Series A, or bootstrapped and profitable. You need senior technical judgment now, not a full-time executive.
This is not for you if
You want a retainer for the sake of having a CTO on the org chart, you are looking for the cheapest possible hourly developer, or you need someone to write most of the code. I can point you to people who do those things well.