I had the pleasure of working with Kartick Vaddadi in his role as a CTO advisor for DPDzero. Our collaboration began with a database-related issue where my initial goal was to downscale disk size to reduce costs. Kartick's thorough assessment of the situation revealed several critical considerations that I had overlooked. His insights helped me realize the risks associated with my original cost optimization plan, ultimately leading me to abandon it. His ability to make me consider various angles of the problem was invaluable. Following this, we tackled another significant challenge: improving team productivity. Kartick conducted one-on-one interviews and identified key areas for improvement, notably the need for a robust product team. His guidance in strengthening my product team directly enhanced the quality of work delivered to the engineering team. Kartick also made me realize the risks associated with end-of-life software in my supply chain, which prompted timely and necessary upgrades. Although Kartick's services come at a premium, he is mindful of the time he spends, ensuring a high return on investment. He is adept at addressing a wide range of issues, from team health and velocity to intricate technical details. His excellent communication skills ensure that each point is thoroughly addressed before moving on to the next. Kartick suggested changes to how we use JIRA and GitHub, which took time to implement but have greatly improved our team's visibility and clarity on sprint activities. Drawing heavily from his experience at Google, his previous startup, and other teams, Kartick helps avoid common mistakes, making his advice invaluable. Kartick Vaddadi gets involved with the team as if he is part of it, getting to know other team members and even helping to improve our interview process and identify areas where we need to make hires. His advice provides a good return on investment, but it requires an open mind to absorb. Sometimes it takes a while to fully grasp his points, but he is patient and works with you through that period. Overall, Kartick's expertise and approach have significantly benefited DPDzero. If you are an early stage/mid stage founder-CTO, please get in touch with Kartick Vaddadi and get some help!

1. As a new founder, I had several domains to understand and appreciate their complexity and interactions. Kartick was very good at making a mental model that really helped me go forward. 2. He generously connected me to people and immensely helped in extracting the insights from all the feedback i had received. 3. Kartick has a great capacity to clarify situations using very effective analogies. This helped me depersonalise a few decisions and eventually helped in me making the right ones, and quicker.

Kartick Vaddadi’s impact on our business has been profound and transformative. Kartick helped bring clarity to our team on goals and priorities. He then broke them down into each individual’s goals that would add up to the team's goals and guided the team to work towards them. We can now both qualitatively and quantitatively measure the work being done. Our engineers are getting better at estimating their work in story points. His timely advice helped us identify some overburdened engineers and some underburdened ones, helping us balance the load to get more done each week and reduce burnout. Thanks to his guidance, our productivity has reached new heights. He identified a couple of people in key roles who had become a bottleneck to the organization and helped us make tough but necessary decisions. He helped us implement cutting-edge technologies to build a robust technical architecture that serves us well. And no matter what the future throws at us, we’re ready to handle it. Kartick was always there when we had concerns and gave constructive feedback that helped me grow professionally. What sets him apart is his ability to communicate complex concepts easily and in a manner that’s understood by everyone by giving appropriate examples. His soft-spoken demeanour and knack for explaining things at the level of the audience in a considerate manner made the entire process smooth and understandable. I highly recommend consulting with Kartick Vaddadi for any organization looking to establish a solid technical foundation and improve overall organizational efficiency. His expertise and approach have been invaluable to our growth and success.

“I was stuck trying to fix a bug, so I asked my founder, who introduced me to Kartick. He solved the problem and gave me a framework to resolve such bugs 10x faster in the future. We spoke for only 20 mins, but the value added was high. On another occasion, we were considering an architectural change in our backend. Kartick helped us understand that this would tie up the entire team for two quarters and still not be the right fit for us. Kartick suggested an alternative that saved the 2 quarters, which we spent growing the business instead.​ Kartick is also helping me lead my team better regarding making difficult decisions, hiring, running the team, and helping my team members grow. Sometimes I go to Kartick with dumb ideas but rather than saying “you are dumb”, he helps me analyze those ideas patiently, and based on the analysis it becomes apparent whether they will work. This attitude is really something that we don’t find easily. While analyzing the idea, he goes really in-depth into business things and I wonder how a tech person is so smooth with analyzing business ideas and can be fast at it too.”

Our Engineer did not have core IOS expertise and was stuck on an issue for some time. I reached out to Kartick, who had built a company on an advanced iPhone app. He quickly agreed and helped us resolve the issue. He also guided our Engineer with good coding practices in Swift language. Later on, he referred us to a fantastic engineer whom we hired.

“When we were hiring an engineering lead and were unsure of a particular candidate, I consulted with Kartick, who helped us identify what we need in the lead, then interviewed him, and gave us a clear evaluation of this person and what roles he'd be suitable for, helping us make a better decision. Further, Kartick connected us to two other engineering leads from his network. ​ On another occasion, when we had a crisis and I was stressed, I called Kartick and he reassured me and gave me a roadmap of how to deal with the crisis, both immediate and longer-term actions, which helped me proceed with confidence, knowing that I'm ready to handle whatever comes next.”

“Kartick helped us to streamline the iOS engineering hiring for us. Kartick gave us a useful perspective to help us improve our shortlisting process to identify great engineers and hire them faster while spending less time on unsuitable profiles. He set up insightful interviews, and identified good talent, who were hired and went on to do well in the company. Kartick delivered more than what we expected, and in a timely manner. I'd work with him again.”

"When building JSW One, I relied upon Kartick as a trusted advisor and received solid advice that helped me make better decisions and execute with high confidence and lower risk. I would recommend Kartick. At any point in a company’s journey - early or late, it’s important to get a sound advisor like Kartick. Otherwise we end up in a loop in tech and that may not result into the promised efficiency/disruption."

“Kartick had been invaluable in getting JSW One off the ground. His major contribution was in hiring key positions like the Principal software Architect and the front end tech leads. In addition his clear structured thinking helped us uncover vendor issues more easily. Also he was able to provide user experience consulting for our product lines with hires which allowed us to both shorten our time to market and improve NPS. He has a lot of experience with startups and has a structured plan for taking your startup off the ground. I would wholeheartedly endorse him as a consulting CTO for startups.”

“We had a key process that was becoming the bottleneck to our entire business, so we contacted Kartick to address this. He understood both the business and technical aspects of the situation, and our users' needs, and delivered a solution quickly that relieved the bottleneck, helping our company process a lot more leads with the manpower we have, while saving time and money by eliminating a labor-intensive manual process.”

Kartick helped us build our iOS engineering team. We needed someone with deep iOS expertise to evaluate candidates and did not have someone matching the profile on our team at the time. The depth he covered in the interviews helped us hire the right engineers who have helped us build a great product over the last two years. iOS is very important for us as a neobank since a large part of our affluent customer base uses iOS. The feedback provided on each candidate was very detailed. He also went beyond his brief and provided technical guidance to our team when we asked him to. The team was able to incorporate best practices on architecture and coding from this guidance. I highly recommend Kartick for the expertise he brings on engineering, iOS in particular, and his ability to cover all details.

"Hiring is one of the most critical and challenging things for startups, especially early. We did not have sufficient skill in-house in a business-critical technology, so we worked with Kartick, whose evaluation of candidates and inputs were extremely valuable for us. The people who joined were solid, which validates Kartick's work. I recommend Kartick for his combination of experience, strong opinions and the expertise/skill to back it up and deliver solutions."