About
What CTOforge is.
CTOforge is a fractional CTO practice for founders turning next-generation ideas into resilient companies. We sit alongside, not above. Fractional product and technology executive leader with nearly three decades in the seat and a record of protecting founders from preventable and costly mistakes.
Why this exists.
Most founders we meet are stuck in one of three places. They have an idea and no build yet. They have an MVP and aren't sure it's any good. Or they have a product that's working against them. The common thread: they don't need a full-time CTO. They need someone who's actually done the job and will tell them the truth.
The advisory market is full of generalists with frameworks. The agency market is full of teams that build what you ask for, not what you need. CTOforge sits in between: embedded enough to own the call, scoped enough not to become overhead.
How we work.
Builder.
We sit alongside your team and own the calls, not just suggest them.
Tailored, not templated.
Your stage and constraints shape the engagement. No playbooks-in-search-of-a-problem.
Founder-first, board-credible.
Plain talk with you. A technical story your board and investors will trust.
Asset-leaving.
Whatever the engagement, you walk away with a strategic playbook and a plan you can run with on your own.
Dave Wilkinson, MBA.
I've been the CTO at every stage you can imagine. Garage labs with a founder and a dream. Idea-stage shops with two engineers scrambling to build a MVP. Series-A startups agonizing over which technical decision they're about to regret. Cash-flow-positive companies that built the wrong thing first and are struggling with paying to maintain it.
The most expensive technology decisions I've seen don't signal themselves as technology decisions. By the time a team discovers them, the structure they skipped is the ceiling they can't get beyond. You can be shipping on schedule and still be heading somewhere nobody wanted you to go. Our work sets the foundation before the build starts, because that's when the most common early mistakes can be avoided.
Every founder has the guts, instinct, and domain expertise to get it started, but they need to discover if their ideas are something the market actually needs. We make sure by the time they figure that out, they are in a much better position to reshape their product to fit.
I started CTOforge because most of the non-technical founders I knew weren't really in a position to hire an experienced CTO. They started with a team that is all heart, but they really needed someone who has seen it all, won a few, lost a few, and can guide them through muddy waters without burning all of their precious cash. CTOforge is intended to be an answer to that.
What we leave behind.
Every CTOforge engagement leaves you with a Business Operating System: the documented architecture decisions, the technical roadmap tied to commercial milestones, the hiring plan, and the runbook your team can execute against without us in the room.
Consultants take their slides home. We leave an operating system behind.
Who we love to work with.
We're a fit when the technical decisions in front of you are bigger than your in-house bench can absorb. Ideally:
- ·Stage: seed to Series-A.
- ·Team size: 5 to 50 people.
- ·Industry: vertical-agnostic. SaaS and tech-enabled services most often.
- ·Trigger: a CTO just left, a board is asking hard questions about AI strategy or technical debt, the offshore team has gone off the rails, or a everything product feels way more difficult than it needs to be.
Your technology is at your core, but it's not your identity.
Let's talk about the company you're actually trying to build.