Technical due diligence & fractional CTO · Nashville, Tennessee
Independent technical and product due diligence for startups, investors, and boards across Middle Tennessee. Two weeks, a written assessment, and a 90-day plan you can actually run.
Technical due diligence is an independent assessment of a company's software, engineering team, and technical roadmap, carried out before an investment, an acquisition, or a decision to rebuild. It answers one question: can this technology and this team deliver the business plan, and what will it cost to get there?
It is broader than a code audit. Code quality is one of five inputs, and it is rarely the one that decides the outcome.
The code is rarely the thing that kills you.
What kills you is a team that cannot ship the roadmap it already committed to. An architecture decision that looked cheap and turned out to be permanent. A cost curve that triples the month you finally get the growth you asked for.
None of that shows up in a static analysis report. They are judgment calls — and judgment is what you are actually hiring when you bring in someone at this level. I have spent [N] years building engineering organizations and I still ship production software myself, which is the combination that lets me tell the difference between a team that is slow and a team that is stuck.
Fit
A good fit
Not a fit
I will tell you this on the first call rather than after you have paid.
Engagements
Fixed scope, fixed price, written deliverable. You know what you are getting and what it costs before anything starts.
Starting at$2,500
A fast, honest read on whether the technical situation is what you think it is. Architecture, delivery process, run cost, and the five risks that actually matter, ranked.
Starting at$7,500
The full assessment across five lenses — architecture, delivery health, team capability, roadmap coherence, and risk. Written for a board, not for engineers.
Starting at$3,000/mo
Ongoing technical judgment on call. Weekly working session, major decisions reviewed before they are made, and support through engineering hiring.
Comparison
The three are often used interchangeably and they are not the same thing. Hiring the wrong one is expensive in both directions.
| Technical advisor | Fractional CTO | Full-time CTO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time | A few hours a month | 4–8 hours a week | Full time |
| Typical cost | Often equity only | $3,000–8,000 per month | Executive salary plus meaningful equity |
| Makes decisions | No — advises only | Yes, on technical direction | Yes, owns all of it |
| Manages engineers | No | No | Yes |
| On call for incidents | No | No | Yes |
| Best when | You want a sounding board and occasional introductions | You have people who can build but nobody who can decide | The technology is the business, and it needs an owner every day |
Method
Every diligence engagement runs the same five passes in the same order, because the later ones only make sense once the earlier ones are answered. Nothing here is proprietary. If you want to run it yourself, run it.
What breaks first at ten times current load, what the cost curve looks like as you get there, and which technical decisions are genuinely irreversible versus cheap to change later. Most founders spend their anxiety on the second list.
Whether the test suite catches anything real, not what the coverage number says. Deploy frequency, rollback capability, and how long it takes an idea to reach a customer.
Who actually ships. Where the bus factor is one. Whether velocity is limited by people, process, or architecture — three problems that look identical from the outside and have nothing in common as fixes. And the question underneath all of it: can this team execute the roadmap it has already promised?
Whether what is being built matches the market claim being made. What is under construction that should not be. What is missing that the customer you say you want considers table stakes.
Security posture, key-person exposure, vendor lock-in, cost trajectory, and compliance gaps. Each one ranked by severity with an honest estimate of what it costs to fix, so you can decide what to ignore on purpose.
Service area
I live and work in the Nashville area, and for this particular kind of work that matters more than it sounds like it should.
The third lens — team capability — is the one that decides most engagements, and it is the one you cannot assess over video. Engineers tell you different things sitting across a table than they do on a call with their manager's name in the participant list. When I can be in the building for a day of interviews, the assessment is materially better. That is the single strongest argument for hiring someone local rather than flying in a firm from a coast.
The same goes for hiring advice. If I am helping you build an engineering team, knowing what senior engineers in this market actually cost, where they come from, and who they will take a call from is worth more than a national benchmark report.
That said, roughly half of diligence work is document review and remote interviews. If you are outside the region and the engagement suits it, the work travels fine.
On-site, no travel charge
Nashville · Franklin · Brentwood · Cool Springs · Berry Hill · Green Hills · Spring Hill · Murfreesboro · Hendersonville · Mount Juliet · Columbia
Counties
Davidson · Williamson · Rutherford · Sumner · Wilson · Maury
Remote
Anywhere in the United States
About
I am a Director of Software Engineering at [company], where I am responsible for [N] engineers across [N] teams. [One sentence: the hardest thing you have shipped or fixed at that scale.]
I am also the sole builder of Juxtah, an iOS proximity-alert app — architecture, backend, mobile client, and App Store release, all of it. That matters here for one specific reason.
I still ship. That is unusual for someone at my level, and it is why I can tell the difference between a team that is slow and a team that is stuck.
Most people who assess engineering organizations stopped writing software years ago, and it shows in what they miss. Most people who can still read a codebase have never had to answer to a board for a missed quarter. The work I do sits in between.
Questions
Technical due diligence is an independent assessment of a company's software, engineering team, and technical roadmap, usually performed before an investment, an acquisition, or a major rebuild decision.
It evaluates whether the technology can support the business plan, what it would cost to get there, and which risks are severe enough to change the decision. A complete assessment covers architecture, delivery health, team capability, roadmap coherence, and a ranked risk register.
My technical due diligence engagements start at $7,500 for teams of eight engineers or fewer, and $15,000 for larger or multi-product companies.
A shorter five-day teardown starts at $2,500 and covers architecture, delivery process, run cost, and the top five risks. All engagements are fixed price, quoted before work begins, and billed 50% up front.
Two weeks from the day access is granted, for a full assessment.
The shorter teardown takes five business days. In both cases the clock starts when repository and infrastructure access is actually granted, not when the agreement is signed — delayed access is the most common reason technical assessments run late.
A fractional CTO is an experienced engineering leader who works with a company part-time, typically four to eight hours a week, providing technical direction, architecture decisions, and hiring support without the cost of a full-time executive.
A fractional CTO makes technical decisions but does not manage engineers, carry a pager, or write production code. If you need those things, you need a full-time hire.
Hire fractional when you have people who can build but nobody who can decide.
That is the common case: two or three capable engineers, a founder who is not technical, and a set of architecture and hiring decisions nobody in the room is qualified to make. Hire full-time when the technology is the business, when the team needs day-to-day management, or when you need someone accountable in the building every day.
A code audit evaluates the code. Technical due diligence evaluates whether the business plan is achievable with this technology and this team.
Code quality is one of five inputs and is rarely the deciding one. Plenty of companies fail with clean codebases because the team cannot ship, the architecture cannot scale economically, or the roadmap does not match the market they are describing to investors.
A written report of 15 to 25 pages, plus a 90-minute readout call.
The report opens with an executive summary written so a non-technical board member can read it cold and act on it, followed by findings ranked and coded by severity, and a 90-day plan with named owners and an explicit sequence. Teardown engagements deliver a 5 to 8 page memo and a 60-minute readout.
Yes. About half of the work is document review and remote interviews, so engagements travel well.
On-site work in Nashville, Franklin, Brentwood, and the surrounding Middle Tennessee area carries no travel charge. For clients elsewhere in the United States, I quote travel separately or run the engagement fully remote, whichever suits the situation.
Yes, and it is one of the two most common reasons people call.
The answer is usually not the one either side of the argument expects. Rebuilds are frequently proposed to solve delivery problems that are actually team or process problems, and a rebuild will not fix those — it will restart them on a new stack. Establishing which of the three you are looking at is exactly what the assessment is for.
Yes, and they should — a hidden assessment produces worse information.
I state my attribution rule at the start of every interview and I honor it, including when leadership pushes. Engineers will not tell you the truth if they believe it gets a colleague fired, and the truth is the entire product. Before an engagement starts, we agree in writing on who reads the report and whether findings are attributed to named people.
Next step
Thirty minutes, no deck, no pitch. Tell me what you are worried about and I will tell you whether I am the right person to help — and if I am not, who is.
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