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Bayun
Bayun is building a security framework, and wanted to see how a CTO would evaluate it. I put myself in the shoes of a CTO (a role I'd performed earlier) evaluating Bayun, both as a technology and a company. This brought up some blind spots in the messaging, as well as aspects that are not convincing.
I created an alternative version of the slide deck and recorded myself presenting it, to illustrate a solution to the problems found. This helped Bayun improve their pitch.
In other roles than consulting
The above section describes the work I did in Developer Tools in other roles than as a consultant:
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Full-time CTO (2020):
As a full-time CTO of a startup working in developer tools, I delivered the following outcomes:
Growth: Handled 5x in 6 months while maintaining 99.94% uptime in some months and 100% in others.
Put in place engineering processes like code review, sprint discipline, prioritisation, tech debt reduction, security, exploring new technologies.
Engineering culture: Improved by conducting talks, brainstorms, freedom week, etc.
Coordinated with designers, including making interactive prototypes to explore product ideas.
Product:
Worked as interim product lead.
Contributed to identifying expectations for hiring Product Lead, PM and APM and interviewed multiple people.
Identified critical metrics to track the health of the company and the product.
Proposed a new product line to grow 10x.
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People:
Ownership: Increased ownership for engineers.
Hiring: Identified our goals as a company, and worked backwards to identify the product needed and planned and executed hiring accordingly, including key roles like Product Lead, and brought in product, UX and eng leaders as consultants / advisors to cover critical gaps in the meantime.
Retention: Retained two key employees. There was zero attrition in the eng team until after I left.
Apiary (2011):
Apiary was a platform at Google that handles all API calls into Google. I worked as a DevOps engineer / SRE on this platform, which had traffic of 100,000 requests/second. The service was fast and reliable, with hardly any outages, during my engagement.
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Google Gears (2008):
I built an imaging API in Google Gears.
Let's talk about what I can do for your startup
Outcomes-based engagement
Is your startup surpassing your milestones, but your tech is not keeping up?​​ If so, this engagement may be the solution for you:
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I'll start by understanding the outcomes you want. We'll write them down, and order them by priority. We'll brainstorm and iterate on them, perhaps by creating two lists of outcomes and comparing them side by side to bring us clarity on what's truly important. We'll also seek input from your cofounders, advisors and functional leads. Once everything is clear, we'll lock in the outcomes, and start executing.​
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I'll work up to 32 hours a week, and the fee will be $20K for the first 5 months each, and nothing for the rest of the year.​​​​​