Start with "Fractional CTO" or "Data Architect" - you've probably heard those terms before and they're easy to get your head around.

More broadly, we bring a long track record of successfully building software products from the ground-up, raising funds, going to market, and turning around troubled teams.

Values

We like to use hands-on work and delivering working code as a vehicle to derive more strategic and impactful insights. There is no "non-technical CTO (Chief Technology Officer)" here.

We strive to improve upon the typical consulting model

Our goal is not simply to have a transactional dollars-for-code relationship, but to leave your business with stronger and more sustainable technology capabilities than we found it.

You should be left not only with a finished product, but your own organizational know-how to maintain and build upon that product. What does "finished" even mean in today's business landscape? A business that's not innovating or evolving is probably dead.

We want to plan our own obsolescence

Typical consultants come with a myriad of problems — they might leave you with something you're unable to maintain, require expensive re-engagements or even re-writes, and encourage dependence. We prefer our engagements to also provide a scalable architecture, policies and procedures, and management structures. We look beyond just a single project-based solution, including toward the hiring and training of the next generation.

Your transitional CTO

Hiring technical staff and finding technical co-founders is hard; knowing if they're doing a good job is even harder; replacing them if they're not performing can become near-impossible. A lot of companies, in a desperate scramble to hire someone to hit that deadline three months from now, either enter into a big commitment that later turns out to be a mistake, or put off the decision to build something correctly from the start. Let us buy you the time to comfortably make the right decision for your business.

What we aren't

We are not a staffing firm that collects payments in order to help meet a headcount quota; we don't believe "number of filled chairs" by itself is a metric for success. We do not measure productivity by the number of lines of code typed; "work" in a mechanical sense doesn't translate to accomplishing anything. We will not seek to make ourselves irreplaceable. We are not the generic "lowest bidder."

If you're 110% sure you know exactly what you need, can package it into a well-defined project, get your deliverable, and never talk to that person again — you don't need us. But if you plan on technology being one of your core business functions, don't just outsource it.

Chris Shaffer

I have over a decade of experience building technology. That experience ranges from teams in the hundreds to just myself, from pre-series A startups to companies older than my grandparents. I’ve built software and teams for startups – repeatedly – that transformed the definition of “technology” in the office’s vernacular from “that thing that’s always broken” to “the competitive advantage that pushes us forward when all else fails”.

If you have a business, and you use technology, there’s probably something I can bring to the table. That includes all the things that you typically think of: writing code, setting up deployments, cybersecurity, database admin; and some you might not: hiring, mentoring, developing policies and procedures, and setting strategic direction. If you’re doing good work, bringing joy to customers, or making the world a better place, I want to be part of it.

After graduating with a Bachelor's and Master's in Computer Science from Stevens Institute of Technology, Chris went on to develop his career in application architecture, software development, and data engineering. He's worked on financial, business, and consumer platforms as Chief Technology Officer at Climb Credit, as Director of Engineering at Relationship Science, and at Capital IQ.