The rest of this site is written for founders. This page is not.

The diligence work

I assess product and technology risk for investors, from angel and pre-seed through Series A, through Zolanius, the practice I co-founded with Waranya Chamrat. A CTO and a product strategist assess a company together and deliver one verdict rather than two reports. Product, technology, people and execution, read against each other before the verdict is written.

Why the advisory work does not compromise it

The obvious question is how someone who works as a fractional CTO can also assess companies for investors. It is a fair question, and the answer is a set of rules we publish and hold to.

We do not assess a company either of us has advised in the previous six months. We do not take work from a company for six months after we assess it, we never propose it, and it happens only where the commissioning investor asks for it in writing, so we cannot sell remediation arising from our own findings. We take no equity and no success fee in any company we assess, and the fee is fixed regardless of what we find. Nothing from an assessment is ever published, in any form, with no time limit.

Every one of those is revenue we have decided not to earn. That is the point. The separation is what is being sold.

Where the judgment comes from

In 2019 I co-created a blockchain source-code due diligence practice, assessing whether projects had substance behind their claims. The question has not changed since, only the domain.

Before that, and since, thirty years building and leading engineering teams across eleven industries, hardware as well as software, distributed across five regions since 2005.

I have also been on the other side of it. I have run the company being assessed, and prepared what an investor sees. That is a different kind of knowledge from reading a codebase, and it is the part that tells me which questions get answered carefully.