You need technical judgment now. Not in the two or three quarters it takes to source, interview, and land a permanent executive, and not from the vendor who is quoting the work. Somebody has to decide whether the rewrite is a good idea, whether the architecture survives the next stage of growth, and whether the team you have is the team you need.
Whitehorn Ltd. Co. takes a limited number of these engagements, led directly by our founder. You get an operator who has held the role, not an advisor who has read about it.
What This Covers
Four areas, weighted to what the business needs this quarter
Technical Leadership
Direction on retainer. Architecture decisions, build-versus-buy calls, vendor selection, and the technical half of decisions the rest of the leadership team is making anyway.
Architecture & Scalability
Whether what you have survives the next 10x, where it breaks first, and what to do about it in what order. Including the honest answer when a rewrite is the wrong call.
Team Structure & Hiring
What roles to hire and in what order, what good looks like in an interview loop, and how the team should be organized as it grows past the point where everyone knows everything.
Board & Investor Reporting
Translating engineering reality into what a board can act on, and translating board pressure into work the team can actually execute. In both directions, without either side being managed.
The Experience Behind It
Two CTO tenures, not a consulting practice
Our founder has been a full-time CTO twice and has taken a company from seed through Series A, scaling a multi-disciplinary engineering organization from 2 people to more than 30 across software, data science, QA, and infrastructure.
Specific results from those roles include cutting hosting costs by roughly 80% while taking the platform from full utilization to under 25%. That is more than four times the capacity at a fifth of the cost. At another company, halving cloud infrastructure spend while improving performance. Building a company's first dedicated engineering team, its first QA function, and hiring its first product manager. Introducing version control and CI/CD to an engineering organization that had neither.
Also the unglamorous half: reporting to boards, sitting in C-suite meetings, running SOC 2 efforts, moving teams between Kanban and Scrum as they matured, and establishing blameless post-mortems.
How Engagements Start
Small, and often staying that way
Most start with something contained. An assessment, a diligence review, or a few weeks of leadership while you run a search for a permanent hire.
Some stay that size indefinitely, which is a fine outcome. Others grow as the business does and the questions get harder. When an engagement needs more hands than one person, we bring in specialists we have worked with directly rather than staffing it from a bench.
We are also willing to work ourselves out of the role. If what you need is a full-time CTO, helping you define, interview for, and hand off to that person is part of the job.
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