Two fintech founders with strong product instincts and no technical co-founder. We embedded as fractional CTO for 14 months — architecture decisions, first engineering hires, investor due diligence — and stepped back once their full-time VP of Engineering was in seat.
The two co-founders had spent a combined 18 years in wealth management and private credit. They had identified a gap in the market for a platform that connected independent RIAs with alternative investment opportunities that institutional allocators were accessing but smaller advisors could not. The product idea was clear. The demand signal was real — they had spoken to 40 potential customers before writing a line of code. What they did not have was any technical experience, any technical network, or a clear sense of what it would actually cost and how long it would take to build what they were describing.
Their first instinct was to hire a CTO. They had interviewed four candidates and passed on all of them — too junior, too expensive, or not the right cultural fit for an early-stage company still figuring out its product. They found us through a reference from a mutual connection and started the conversation asking about a Discovery engagement. That became a Fractional CTO engagement within the first meeting.
We started by killing three assumptions. The founders had assumed they needed a mobile app on day one — we pushed that to phase two, which saved four months. They had assumed they needed to build their own compliance layer — we identified two existing compliance infrastructure vendors whose APIs handled 90% of their regulatory surface area. And they had planned to build on a microservices architecture because a technical advisor had told them it was "more scalable" — we moved them to a well-structured monolith that their first engineering hires could actually understand and ship features in.
Those three decisions collectively saved an estimated six months of build time and removed the two highest-risk technical unknowns from their fundraising conversation.
The founders' first instinct on hiring was to bring in senior engineers. We pushed them toward a different profile for the first two hires: strong mid-level engineers who had built financial software before and were comfortable with ambiguity. Senior engineers at that stage often want to re-architect things before they ship them. That is the wrong instinct for a pre-revenue fintech trying to reach its first 20 customers.
We wrote the job descriptions, ran the technical screens, and participated in the final round interviews. We were looking for people who could read financial data structures comfortably, who had worked in regulated industries, and who had shipped something real in a small team. Both hires stayed past the Series A close and became the foundation of the engineering org.
The third hire was a DevOps engineer, brought in at month ten specifically to harden the infrastructure ahead of the due diligence process. That timing was intentional.
Technical due diligence in fintech is serious. Investors send engineers to review codebases. They ask pointed questions about security, data handling, compliance architecture, and scalability assumptions. Two of the firms in Cornerstone's Series A process sent detailed technical questionnaires with 40+ questions. We answered all of them, joined the calls where the conversation went deep on architecture, and prepared a 12-page technical narrative document that the founders used as a leave-behind.
The due diligence process produced zero major findings. That is not common. It was the result of building things correctly from the beginning — which is easier to do when the people making the decisions have been through this process before.
The exit from a Fractional CTO engagement should be planned from the beginning. Ours was. We documented architecture decisions as we made them, maintained a decision log that became the onboarding document for the VP of Engineering hire, and spent the final six weeks of the engagement running a structured handoff — sitting in on every engineering meeting, reviewing every PR, and making sure the new VP had a full picture of every open question and future technical decision in the queue.
The Series A closed in month 14. The VP of Engineering started in month 13. We were fully out by the end of month 14. No regressions, no surprise architecture debt, no firefighting in the first 90 days after handoff.