Exactly 4 months ago I published a writeup of my experiences in the Y-Combinator CoFounder matching programme – meeting 30 potential co-founders in 2 months – and comparing it to the UK’s Entrepreneur First. I haven’t founded a company yet,…
It’s not quite a year since my last post on this, but December 2024 is going to be busy so I’m making sure I do it now rather than miss it. This is the second year of running “1st Wednesday”…
Six years ago I was part of EF’s London Cohort (100x aspirational entrepreneurs brought together for 2 months, with pre-seed funding, to meet their co-founder and start a business). Since then I’ve also worked at two successful EF-funded companies. This…
You’re a startup/scaleup founder looking to support your exec-team with some heavy-hitting CTO brains; or you’re a founding CTO looking for guidance from more experienced, “grey-hair”, CTOs. You figure a ‘Fractional CTO’ (fCTO) is the solution; great – now how…
(this is part of a series on fCTOs and CTOs at startups, where some is similar as at established companies, but a lot is different) The 5 elements of a Startup CTO As a jobtitle, “Startup CTO” is a misnomer…
There are 4 necessary parts of a proto-CTO: Founder, CTO, VPE, Engineer CTO doesn’t really exist as a role until SeriesB – but without someone performing the proto-CTO role the company probably won’t survive to reach that stage I often…
This came up recently on a mailing list of CTOs: If you had to start from the ground up again, what/where would you invest more or less time? (thanks to Klaas Ardinois for posing the question). This is a particularly…
There are three simple dimensions which neatly separate most fractional CTOs: Some combinations of these work particularly well, and I’ve seen them succeed over and over again. The two stand out combos are: From the CEO/Board perspective the key decision…
A year ago I got together with Josh Wohle and started a monthly meetup for London-based CTOs (and CTOs-to-be). The short version: it was born from frustration that London’s meetups hadn’t really recovered after the COVID-19 pandemic, and while there…