A fractional CTO for the decisions that are costly to reverse

A fractional CTO, sometimes called an outsourced CTO, is a senior technical leader who works for your company part-time and makes the calls a full-time CTO would make: architecture, stack, hiring, the delivery process and the technical roadmap. You pay for the hours a week the work needs, instead of a full-time salary. At 2muchcoffee two CTOs hold the seat: Dmytro Melnychenko and Oleg Logvin.

A fractional CTO turns the business plan into technical decisions and sees them through. In practice the CTO ties the roadmap to the next milestone; makes the stack, hosting and build-or-buy calls while they are cheap to change; defines roles and interviews engineers; runs sprints, code review, releases and on-call; keeps access, data handling and vendor risk in order; and answers the technical questions in a funding round, a data room or an acquirer’s review.

When technical decisions arrive faster than anyone on the team can make them. Four situations usually bring a company there: a non-technical founding team that has to make stack and hiring calls before the first engineer joins; a product built by an agency, freelancers or an AI tool that now needs someone on your side to direct it; a funding round or due diligence where investors ask technical questions; and an established team that has outgrown its lead developer and needs a dedicated leader for hiring, process and architecture.

Light advisory runs up to about 10 hours a week, and the part-time CTO seat runs from about 20 hours a week. Between 10 and 20 hours a week, we quote each case. You can move between tiers as the work changes, with more hours while the roadmap is written and fewer once it runs. A seat usually starts within two weeks and runs month to month.

At 2muchcoffee, light advisory costs $90 an hour for up to about 10 hours a week, and the part-time CTO seat costs $50 an hour from about 20 hours a week, so the larger seat has the lower hourly rate. Between 10 and 20 hours a week, we quote each case. When you hire two or more of our engineers, the CTO seat is free for as long as two or more of them are on the team, and project management comes free or at a flat monthly rate. In that seat the CTO sets the technical direction for their work. For the right startup, the seat can also be paid in equity or a mix of cash and equity.

A fractional CTO fits when you need someone to make the architecture, stack and hiring calls for part of the week. An interim CTO covers a sudden gap in leadership, full-time for a fixed period. A full-time CTO, paid with salary, benefits and usually equity, fits a team that needs a technical leader every day. A consultant advises on a defined question and hands the decision back to you, while a fractional CTO makes the decisions and answers for the results. The time to move to a full-time hire is when the roadmap and the team need that leader in the room all week, and a fractional CTO can then hand the seat over with the plan written down.

Yes. With an in-house team the CTO runs planning and code review, sets the architecture and helps you hire, the way a full-time CTO would; if an outside agency builds the product, the CTO works on your side of that contract, reviews what ships and holds it to the plan. With a 2muchcoffee team the CTO sets the technical direction for the engineers: that is how we built Notesign, an AI EdTech platform, and its WhisperX speech-to-text engine, with four of our engineers, Oleg Logvin in the CTO seat.

We hand the seat over in writing: the roadmap, the architecture decisions and the reasons behind them, the open risks, and the access and accounts the CTO held. Our CTO can also help write the role, interview the candidates and work alongside the new hire for the first weeks.

Yes, for the right startup: the seat can be paid in equity or in a mix of cash and equity. Tell us about the company, its stage and its funding, and we will say whether equity fits.