Four things we do well.
Decisions & Tradeoffs
Build vs buy, stack choices, AI vs traditional, hire vs outsource. The frameworks and judgment to make the calls a founder without a CTO has to make anyway.
Vendor & Partner Selection
Finding the right specialists, agencies, and tools for the work — and knowing which to avoid. We've hired and fired enough of them to tell the difference.
Roadmap Sequencing
What to build first, what to defer, what to never build. Sequencing the work so you ship what matters before you run out of runway.
Technical Diligence
Diligence support for a fundraise or acquisition, partnered with senior reviewers from our network. Quiet, fast, written.
From decision to delivery.
How we work.
Listen
Understand the problem from the founder's perspective, not the technology's.
Map
Diagnose the system: people, code, infrastructure, decisions.
Decide
Propose options with tradeoffs, recommend a path, document why.
Build
Ship code, configure infra, integrate, or hire the right people.
Handoff
Train the team to run what we built; we don't create dependencies.
Compound
Long-term advisory access for the strategic decisions that come later.
Patterns we work on.
Outgrowing the monolith
A growing company needed to break apart an aging system without freezing product. We helped define the boundaries, sequence the work, and bring in senior engineers from our network to execute — so the founder made the call with the right people in the room.
The AI build decision
A founder needed to choose between fine-tuning, RAG, or agents with no time to test all three. We framed the tradeoffs against their actual use case, recommended a path, and lined up a specialist to build it — so they shipped without betting the roadmap on a guess.
Post-raise hiring & sequencing
After a raise, a founder faced a year of hiring and build-vs-buy calls. We modeled the next 18 months, sequenced what to build versus defer, and shaped the hiring plan — so headcount went to what actually moved the company forward.
Ready to move?
We respond to every brief in 48 hours. Long shots welcome — we keep the calendar light on purpose.
Get in touch