Focus on what you do best.

"We're about to make decisions we can't undo — cloud, architecture, hiring, or a bet-the-company technical call — and we want a second pair of eyes that's already been there."

These are the decisions where the cost of being wrong shows up eighteen months later, when it's too late and too expensive to unwind. You don't always need a full-time CTO to get them right. You need someone who's already made them — on both sides of the corporate/startup line — and will tell you what they'd do without selling you the implementation.

I led the cloud engineering chapter that migrated 200+ applications off-premise at Swiss Re, built Pangea's stack from zero, and have sat in enough rooms to know which decisions are reversible and which ones aren't. Whatever shape this takes — an architecture review, a hiring framework, a fractional CTO arrangement, or a single hard conversation — the deliverable is a decision you can defend to your board, your engineers, and yourself in two years.

Because the decisions underneath are the ones everything else stands on.

"Leadership wants us to 'use AI.' We're not sure what that means for our business — or whether the answer is AI at all."

This is the most valuable conversation to have early, and the one most consulting firms skip because there's nothing to invoice. I'd rather spend two weeks figuring out whether something should be built than six months building the wrong thing.

The work here is unglamorous: map the actual workflows, find where human judgment is the bottleneck versus where it's the value, and pressure-test whether AI, automation, better software, or honestly just a process fix is the right answer. You walk away with a thesis, not a roadmap — something you can take to your board and your team that says here's what we're betting on, here's why, and here's how we'll know if we're wrong.

Because the AI conversation usually starts in the wrong place. Strategy first. Stack later.