## 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)

---

I [wrote recently](/content/blog/2019/6/13/in-defense-of-the-plan-part-1/index.html) about the need for long-term planning, even (perhaps especially) in an Agile development environment. I left you with a choice: plan or fail.

The fun part about writing on the internet is that you don’t really have to solve problems: you just have to point them out so that other people can agree with you that yes, there is a problem there, and someone should do something about it. I’m a problem-solver by nature, though, so I can’t just leave it at that. If I’m going to tell people they need to do something, then I’m constitutionally required to help them do it. So we’ve already covered _why_ you need a plan for your product development. Let’s talk about _how_.

Let’s start with a few objections, because I never met a straw man I didn’t like (to poke holes in):

1. “I can’t tell you when we’ll have a whole feature set done because we’re using Scrum/Kanban/Lean Agile/some other Japanese-sounding development process.”
2. “I can’t plan because I don’t know how long it will take to build something six months from now.”
3. “I can’t create a release plan because I don’t want executives to see it and think that my team has committed to specific deliveries way out in the future, where all the uncertainty lies.”

Let’s take these in order…