Fractional CTO
for Founders and Funded Startups
Senior technical leadership, four days a month, for founders making decisions that need someone senior in the room before they need a full-time hire.
Monthly retainer · £4,800 · No equity
The decisions come before the hire
A startup makes its most expensive technical decisions in its first two years - what to build, what to buy, who to hire, which platform to bet on - and usually makes them with nobody senior in the room. Most of those decisions are not full-time work. They are a few days a month of judgment.
What the days cover
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Technical roadmap, reviewed against the plan you raised on
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Architecture decisions reviewed before they are built, not after
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AI features - which to build, which to buy as an API, which to skip
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LLM provider choice, running cost per user, and where your data goes
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Rules for your team’s AI coding tools - what code and data can go in
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Hiring: specification, interviewing and technical assessment of candidates
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Vendor and agency selection, and checking delivery against what they quoted
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Code and delivery review of whoever is building, in-house or outsourced
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Technical input for board and investor conversations
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Technical input on security questionnaires and diligence responses
What you are actually buying
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Four days a month, scheduled in advance. Six to eight focused hours each. Days do not roll over.
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Between days, messages are answered within one working day. Anything that needs a block of work goes into the next scheduled day.
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One board or investor session a quarter is included.
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A fundraise, a diligence process or a production crisis is a spike, not a day. Those are quoted separately.
What it is not
This is a senior advisory role, not a delivery one. Your production code is written by your team or under a separate build engagement - not on these days. Where something needs building, we scope it and it goes to your engineers, your agency, or ours - you choose.
Rocking Tech Ltd supplies your fractional technology leadership under a services contract - not as a director or officer of your company, and with no board seat. The accountability for running the company stays with your board.
Pricing
One retainer. Monthly, invoiced in advance. Price excludes VAT.
The first three months are the engagement - onboarding first, then the first decisions worked through with you and documented. After that it runs monthly, with 30 days’ notice either way.
£4,800
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Four days a month of senior technical time
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Working session with your team on each of the four days
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Architecture and roadmap decisions documented as they are made
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Messages answered within one working day
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One board or investor session a quarter
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Onboarding in month one: code, roadmap, suppliers and team
Fundraise support, diligence support and a full-time CTO search are scoped and quoted separately as fixed fees, rather than absorbed into the retainer. Additional capacity is available on request.
I take one fractional client at a time. Full terms are set out in the engagement letter.
What this replaces
An experienced full-time CTO costs £185,000 to £210,000 in year one once National Insurance, pension and a recruitment fee are counted, plus equity, and takes about four months to hire.
That is rarely the real comparison, though. The real one is what a wrong architecture decision, a stalled build or a senior mis-hire costs - and any of those can run into six figures long before anyone calls it a problem.
How it starts
Introductory call
Where the business is, what has been built, what the next twelve months are supposed to look like, and which decision is currently stuck.
Onboarding, in month one
Read the code, the roadmap and the supplier set-up, and meet whoever builds. The first decisions go on the record in month one.
The rhythm, from month two
Days scheduled ahead, decisions worked through, documented and followed up.
If you do not need a fractional CTO yet, you will be told - and if one question needs answering, that is a Discovery Sprint.
Track record
Anatoly Silko
Founder, Rocking Tech
Led technology from inception at a consumer marketplace startup from 2016 to 2018 - a ten-person team across in-house, contract and outsourced delivery, the technical strategy, the supplier contracts and the budget. Then an MBA at Cranfield, then seven years building, rescuing and running production software for UK businesses, most of it alongside founders. Healthcare, education and the creative industries, where software has to work and has to comply.
That includes rebuilding a UK student-employment platform and running it through to the sale of the platform and the handover to the buyer’s engineers - the kind of relationship this retainer is built for.
The roadmap conversation and the code review are the same person.
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MBA, Cranfield School of Management
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NatWest Accelerator Alumnus 3x
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Zend & Laravel Certified
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Association for Competitive Technology - Member
Frequently asked questions
Why three months?
Month one is orientation - judge it at day 30 and you are judging onboarding, not the work. The decisions that pay for this get made in months two and three.
Do you take equity?
No. Cash only, and no dilution - one less line on your cap table to explain at your next raise.
How is this different from the Platform Discovery Sprint?
The Discovery Sprint answers one question once - build, rebuild or buy - and ends with a document. This is the ongoing version: the decisions keep coming, and someone senior keeps working through them with you. If you have had one, month one starts from its report.
If you recommend a build, do you build it?
Only if you want us to. Any Rocking Tech build is quoted like anyone else's, and getting a competing quote is sensible - I would. If you would rather your adviser had no build interest at all, say so at the start.
Which technology are you opinionated about?
PHP and Laravel, Node, Python, React and Vue, AWS, Azure and GCP, and AI and LLM-based systems - including platforms built with Lovable, Bolt, Cursor and the rest. Where the right answer is a stack we do not build in, that is still the recommendation.
What if we hire a full-time CTO?
Then it has worked. Recruiting your full-time CTO is quoted separately as a fixed fee, handover included.
How quickly can you start?
Usually within two weeks, subject to capacity.
Book a call
Tell us what you have built, what you raised on, and which decision is currently stuck.
Thirty minutes, no obligation.