Harnessing Experience at a Fraction of the Cost

As a startup, one of the most important decisions you can make is ensuring you have access to experienced technical leadership. While hiring a full-time CTO can be expensive, there’s a better alternative than going it alone: the fractional CTO.

Five Years of Giving Dangerously

Who Cares if it Scales?

Across the country, in every accelerator, exec team meeting, advisor session, and board meeting, startups are asked the same question:

“But how will it scale?”

My answer: “Who cares?”

Startups: You Don’t Need a CTO (Yet)

Generosity

Just over a year ago, I embarked on a crazy experiment: I wanted to see if I could make a living by giving. Not investing in startups, not donating a portion of my time and money to a cause, just giving. After reading Adam Grant’s book, Give and Take, last summer, I decided to take the “Give First” idea espoused by Adam, Brad Feld, David Cohen, and others to its logical extreme. I would give first, second, and third, then give a little more, without requiring any equal trades in return, and see what happened. I wanted to see if Adam was right, that people respond to generosity with generosity, that the majority of “matchers” in humanity want to lift givers up while bringing takers down. I’d already seen what takers could do and I was not impressed. Now I wanted to see what a giver could accomplish.

Spoiler: it’s a lot.