When to call
The four situations that bring boards and PE firms to me
Technical DD on an asset-heavy acquisition before capital is committed. You need someone on your side of the table — not the CTO's.
Independent review before a major capex program gets board sign-off. IoT rollout, grid modernization, platform migration.
Repeated implementation failures. Jira looks green. Assets stay dumb. Someone in the chain isn't telling you what's actually happening.
You approved the program. You've been getting updates. Quietly, you're not sure you'd know if something was wrong. That's the call.
The position
Independent technical oversight. Not a consultant. Not a fractional CTO.
I work as a technical auditor and strategic advisor on the investor and board side. I speak in risk, liability, and capital efficiency — not feature roadmaps and sprint velocity.
I am not here to fix it. I am here to tell you if it can be fixed — and what it will actually cost.
Years in defense, energy, utilities, and water infrastructure
Infrastructure endpoints modernized — zero downtime
Capital deployment guided through independent technical risk assessment
The filter
What I don't do
This section exists because the wrong engagement wastes everyone's time. If what you need is on this list, I can refer you to someone better suited.
Write production code or manage engineering teams
Run Scrum, manage Jira, or optimize sprints
Build MVPs or work with early-stage founders
Take SMB, SaaS, or general technology consulting work
Soften bad news to protect relationships inside the org
Negotiate software license discounts — I negotiate architecture and risk
In practice
What independent technical governance looks like when it matters
A water authority believed expensive third-party software was the only option for high-speed drive-by IoT meter reading. The vendor's proposal was accepted as technically mandatory.
Independent protocol review identified that the hardware communication layer could support a custom lightweight solution. Reverse-engineered the protocol. System reads at 40mph from 30 feet.
OUTCOME
Eliminated millions in licensing fees. System deployed globally.
14 million legacy transmission devices on deprecated protocols. Data synchronization failing at scale during grid modernization. The system could not go down. The system had to change.
Architected a high-throughput ingestion layer bridging legacy hardware with a modern cloud analytics platform — legacy and new running in parallel until the transition was complete.
OUTCOME
14M+ endpoints migrated. Zero downtime. Real-time grid visibility deployed.
The structural problem
Your CTO controls
what the board sees.
They decide what's a “known issue” and what stays off the slide. That's not malicious — it's structural. A CTO has a career, a team, and a reputation to protect. Which means the board is never getting the unfiltered picture.
By the time the board finds out, it's a $2M problem — not a conversation.
How I engage
Four ways boards and PE firms work with me
Red Flag Audit
Pre-deal · Pre-approval
2-week sprint. Architecture review, vendor assessment, team capability vs. roadmap reality check. Plain-language memo for the board.
Safe-Fail Migration
Legacy infrastructure
Modernize without downtime in asset-critical environments. Dependency mapping, blast-radius analysis, strangler-fig architecture.
Guardian CTO
Ongoing board-side governance
Independent technical oversight for the board — not the org chart. Monthly briefings in risk language. A second opinion the CTO can't veto.
Technical Board Advisor
Multi-board · portfolio-wide
A standing technical seat across every board or portfolio company you sit on. Catches the bad vendor contract before it's a $2M problem.