Startup Consultancy

Most of the hard calls early-stage operators make don’t have right answers. They have better and worse answers, and the difference is often experience someone else already paid for. Startup Consultancy is the retainer we offer for teams who want access to that experience without hiring it full-time, taking a board observer, or making it anyone’s investment thesis.

The work is deliberately unshaped. One week it’s a 90-minute architecture review; the next, a hiring debrief after a senior interview; the next, a quiet read of a term sheet before the lawyer’s clock starts. We reserve the bandwidth; you use it where it’s most useful that month. A standing weekly sync anchors the cadence, but most of the value happens in the async loop in between.

We’re direct about what this is not. It’s not a fractional CTO role — we won’t own delivery, we won’t be on the hook for ship dates, and we won’t run your engineering team. It’s not coaching; we’ll give you opinions, not process. And it’s not cheap on a per-hour basis — the math only works if your problem is senior calls, not execution.

Clients who get the most out of this engagement tend to be solo or near-solo founders about 12–24 months in, or first-time CTOs at Series A who’ve inherited a team and realise the questions got harder than the ones they’d solved before. If that’s you, it’s probably the right shape. If what you actually need is a fractional engineering leader to own delivery, we’ll tell you that on the first call.