Four ways to work together
Every engagement begins with a Red Flag Audit. The real goal is a small number of long-term Guardian CTO and Technical Board Advisor relationships — not one-off rescue missions.
Red Flag Audit
Pre-deal · Pre-approval · Post-pilot failure
Kill the bad deal, or validate the good one under realistic constraints. Most technical due diligence stops at the CIM and the CTO's presentation. This doesn't.
It reviews what the system actually does under realistic conditions — not what the deck says it does.
FIXED FEE
2-week sprint · anchored to deal or program size
“I am not here to fix it. I am here to tell you if it can be fixed — and what it will actually cost.”
SCOPE
Architecture and system map review including vendors and data flows
Codebase sanity check — depth depends on access and timebox
Team capability assessment: can this team actually deliver what's in the deck?
Vendor claim verification against physical and environmental constraints
Plain-language red-flag memo for investors and board — no technical theater
Safe-Fail Migration
Legacy infrastructure · Asset-critical environments
Modernize without downtime in environments where the system cannot go dark.
Plants, grids, pipelines, and fleets don't have maintenance windows long enough to rewrite from scratch. The legacy system has to keep running while the new one is built around it — then choked off safely.
MONTHLY RETAINER
3-month roadmap engagement
“The system that cannot go down has to change anyway. That's the problem I exist to solve.”
SCOPE
Dependency mapping and blast-radius analysis — what touches what
Rollback and fail-safe protocols for every phase of the transition
Dual-write and strangler-fig architecture: legacy and new live in parallel
Implementation playbook for the internal team or chosen vendor
Vendor challenge and architecture review before commitments are made
Guardian CTO
Board-side oversight · 6–12 month engagements
An independent technical seat on the investor and board side. Not a fractional CTO. Not an interim engineering lead. An independent voice that reports to the board — not the org chart.
No career to protect inside the company. No vendor relationships to manage. No reason to soften the truth.
MONTHLY RETAINER
Small number of clients at any time · 6–12 month engagements
“I am the adult in the room until you find the long-term leader.”
SCOPE
Monthly board-ready technical briefings in risk and capital language
Independent architecture and vendor reviews before commitments are made
Capital approval sequencing and guardrails
Reality checks on team capability vs. what's in the deck
Board and IC prep — risk and ROI framing, not Jira screenshots
Technical Board Advisor
Multi-board · PE portfolio-wide · Indefinite retainer
Most technology failures at the board level aren't single catastrophic decisions — they're a hundred small approvals that nobody with technical judgment ever reviewed. By the time a board asks for a Red Flag Audit or a Guardian CTO, the damage is usually already done.
This is the standing alternative — a permanent technical seat that catches the bad vendor contract, the underscoped migration, the confident CTO presentation that doesn't hold up, before it becomes a $2M mistake instead of a five-minute question in a board meeting. One retainer relationship, scaled to the number of boards or portfolio companies you need covered — not a per-project fee every time a new company needs a technical read.
MONTHLY RETAINER
Ongoing · no defined end date · scales across multiple boards or portfolio companies
“Guardian CTO is the adult in the room until you find the long-term leader. This is what happens after — or instead.”
SCOPE
Attendance at board or portfolio review meetings as independent technical voice
Risk review on technology spend above an agreed threshold before approval
First call when a technology crisis or vendor dispute surfaces
Quarterly written risk memo — plain language, board-ready
Available across multiple portfolio companies under one retainer for PE Operating Partners
Every engagement starts with a conversation
A 30-minute technical risk discussion costs nothing. If your board approved a program you can't fully evaluate, or you're heading into a deal where the tech story needs to hold up — that's the call.