Fractional CTO & AI Advisor

When to hire a fractional CTO

Four common profiles we work with:

• Pre-seed or seed startups with a non-technical founder. You haven't hired a full-time CTO, but you need senior technical judgment for fundraising conversations, technical due diligence, initial architecture, and the first few engineering hires.
• SMBs (25–250 FTE) without a senior technical leader. You have a team of engineers and a head-of-engineering, but no one at the executive level owning technology strategy. Vendor selection, AI adoption, security posture, and cloud architecture decisions are happening in silos.
• PE-owned companies in transformation. The existing engineering org needs leadership augmentation during a strategic shift — migration, modernization, AI adoption, M&A integration.
• Organizations between CTOs. Your CTO left. The permanent replacement search will take 4-6 months. You need interim coverage that keeps engineering moving and gives the incoming CTO a clean handoff.

The three engagement tiers

Advisor Retainer — $7,500 / month

4 hours per week. Strategic advisor voice in the room.

• Quarterly deep-dive strategic review (architecture, roadmap, team, hiring plan)
• Weekly office hours (1 hour live + async follow-up)
• Ad-hoc Slack / Discord access for urgent questions
• Emergency response for critical issues (security incidents, infrastructure failures, board-level decisions)
• Review of major architectural decisions before they ship
• First-pass review of engineering hire candidates (résumés, interview panels)

Best for: pre-seed startups, small SMBs that can't yet justify deeper engagement, organizations augmenting an existing but junior technical team.

Fractional CTO — $18,000 / month · most common

16 hours per week. Embedded technical leadership.

• Everything in Advisor, plus:
• Weekly standup with the engineering team (1 hour)
• Architecture reviews and technical design work on in-flight projects
• Hiring involvement: JDs, interview panels, offer negotiations, onboarding review
• Board and investor work: technical sections of board decks, due diligence responses, investor updates
• Vendor selection and evaluation (SaaS, cloud, AI vendors, infra)
• Strategic roadmap ownership — not just advice, but accountability
• Security review at major releases and annually

Best for: post-seed / Series-A startups, SMBs with real revenue needing a senior technical leader, PE-owned companies during transformation.

Interim CTO — $35,000 / month

Full-time equivalent. Covers the gap while you search for a permanent CTO.

• Everything in Fractional CTO, plus:
• Direct engineering management — the team reports to Marc during the engagement
• Board / investor representation on technology matters
• Technical due diligence for fundraising (data rooms, DD calls, security questionnaires)
• Permanent CTO search partnership with the board / CEO (job spec, candidate filtering, interview participation)
• Structured handoff to the incoming permanent CTO: documentation, team intros, overlap weeks if scheduled

Best for: organizations with an acute CTO gap (recent departure, planned transition, or post-acquisition vacancy). Typical engagement length: 3-6 months.

Optional conversion: Interim engagements can convert to ongoing Advisor or Fractional CTO after the permanent CTO starts — if it's useful to the incoming leader.

What a typical Fractional CTO week looks like

If you're evaluating the Fractional tier, here's what the 16 hours/week actually look like in a normal client engagement:

• 1 hour — weekly engineering standup (what shipped, what's blocked, what's next)
• 2-4 hours — architecture review, code review, or technical design on active projects
• 1-2 hours — hiring involvement (JDs, interview panels, offer calls, onboarding reviews)
• 1-2 hours — board or investor-facing work (board deck contributions, DD responses, investor updates)
• 3-4 hours — ad-hoc Slack / Discord availability for team questions, decisions, and support
• 1-2 hours — strategic work: roadmap planning, vendor evaluations, security reviews, risk registers
• 1-2 hours — written artifacts: memos to the board, decision documents, architecture diagrams

Week-to-week scope shifts based on what's urgent. The 16-hour budget is a guideline, not a timesheet. Some weeks are all board prep for a fundraise; others are all hiring-panel work; others are architecture for a new product line.

Relationship to the Claude Code Practice

Fractional CTO is a broader engagement than any Claude Code service. A Fractional CTO engagement often includes a Claude Code initiative — a Training workshop, a Private Deployment, or a Managed Retainer — but covers the whole engineering-leadership surface, not just AI tool adoption.

If you only need help adopting Claude Code, use the Claude Code Practice. If you need a senior engineering leader covering architecture, hiring, vendors, board relations, security, and cloud strategy, with AI as one topic among many, use this service.

Common bundles

• Fractional CTO + Claude Code Training workshop — $18K/mo + $15K one-time, bundled at $30K combined ($3K savings). Workshop delivered in month 2 of the engagement.
• Advisor + Claude Code Agency retainer — $7.5K/mo advisor + $9.5K/mo Partner retainer = $17K/mo. Advisor mode for pre-seed where the Claude Code retainer handles execution, Marc handles strategy.
• Interim CTO + Enterprise Claude Code Setup — $35K/mo + $45K one-time, bundled at $75K combined first month, $35K/mo after ($5K savings on setup). Common for PE-owned orgs in transformation.

Custom bundles built during the free AI Readiness Assessment.

What separates Marc from other fractional CTOs

28 years shipping production software, starting in 1997. Engineering leadership for Fortune 500 clients from 2002-2010 via Source Nine: Kellogg's, Keebler, ConAgra Foods, Hertz, Stryker, Eaton. Founded 2 Acre Studios in 2010 as a working lab — 60+ open-source AI repositories, 624 GitHub stars, two shipped AI products. Current CTO and co-founder at KineticArc.ai (industrial AI reasoning, pre-seed raising). Active fractional role at CompleteU. 2026 ARC-AGI-3 Kaggle competitor on the hardest public reasoning benchmark.

This is operational, not theoretical. Most fractional CTOs specialize in one of: (a) pure advisory, (b) a specific vertical, or (c) a single technology. Marc brings end-to-end: production engineering, team leadership, board communication, fundraising, vendor selection, and deep AI expertise — including running an active research program on the current frontier benchmark.