Los Angeles founders don't need a full-time CTO. They need the right one, part-time.
For non-technical founders building in Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and across Southern California: hire a former CTO as your fractional tech partner. Strategy, architecture, developer oversight, and hands-on development — without the $200K+ salary or the equity hit. Most fractional CTOs stopped coding years ago. I didn't.
$40/hr · Former CTO · Toptal Top 3% · 5 free hours · 13+ years shipping production software
Fractional CTO for Los Angeles startups
The founders I meet in Los Angeles rarely arrive from engineering. They come out of agencies, studios, talent, commerce, or a brand they already built once — people who understand audience and distribution better than almost anyone, and who are further from the code than a Bay Area founder would be. That is a genuine advantage, and it is exactly why the early technical decisions matter more here: you can get real traffic to a product before the thing underneath it is ready for real traffic.
It also shapes what actually breaks. LA startups are mostly consumer — marketplaces, subscription apps, creator tools, commerce, media platforms — so the problems are how fast the first screen paints on a mid-range phone, whether an App Store review is going to land the week you launch, whether billing and cancellation were designed or bolted on, and what a spike does to your infrastructure bill. Enterprise concerns like procurement and multi-tenancy come later, if at all.
What you usually need is not someone to explain that engineering matters. It is someone on your side of the table who will make the early calls with you, then read the code your team or your agency is producing and tell you honestly whether it is any good.
Serving founders across Southern California
Southern California is not a single startup scene, and treating it as one is how founders outside the Westside end up underserved. Los Angeles and Santa Monica are where most of the conversations start — consumer apps, media and entertainment tech, marketplaces, creator tools. Orange County skews toward commerce, health and wellness, and established businesses building their first real software. San Diego is its own market again: biotech, defence-adjacent engineering, and a quietly strong B2B SaaS community. They need different things, and the honest version of a location page says so rather than pretending the region is one place.
Because the work is remote and Pacific-aligned, where you sit on that 120-mile spread changes nothing about the engagement. There is no travel premium for San Diego and no in-person retainer for Santa Monica — nobody in this region is driving to a weekly meeting anyway, and pretending otherwise has never made a product better. You get the weekly call, the code reviews, and same-day weekday responses wherever you are. The same applies further out, through the Inland Empire and the rest of California.
What that produces is worth judging on output rather than on a promise. The products shipped under my technical lead are the honest version of what a part-time technical partner delivers — real platforms, live users, and the architecture decisions that kept working after launch.
What a fractional CTO does for an LA startup
Five areas where Los Angeles founders — building consumer products, marketplaces, and media platforms with real audiences already watching — lose the most time and money when they guess. A senior technical partner closes the gap.
Tech Stack Decisions
A consumer product lives or dies on things an enterprise stack never optimises for: how fast the first screen paints on a mid-range phone over cellular, how quickly you can ship without an App Store review blocking you, and what your infrastructure costs per thousand users. I help you pick for those constraints instead of for a whiteboard diagram.
Architecture Reviews
LA products get their traffic in spikes — a creator posts, a placement lands, a campaign goes live — and a system built for a smooth growth curve falls over on exactly the day you cannot afford it to. I find what breaks under a 50x hour before it costs you the launch you spent six months earning.
Hands-on Development
When your team or your contract developers hit a hard problem, I jump in and ship the code myself. Not 'review and suggest.' Open the PR, write the tests, deploy the fix. I write production code every single week.
Developer Oversight
LA has more agencies and contract dev shops per square mile than almost anywhere, and their invoices all look convincing. I review the code you're paying for, sit in on standups, and give you an honest read on whether the velocity is real — or whether you're funding a rewrite you'll have to pay for twice.
Roadmap Planning
The consumer trap is building features because a competitor shipped them. I help you sequence around the two numbers that decide whether the business works — what it costs to acquire a customer and how long they stay — so every sprint moves one of them instead of just adding surface area.
LA founders need an advisor and a builder — in one hire
The default LA setup is an agency to build it and an advisor to tell you whether the agency is any good. That is two invoices and a translation problem, and you are the translator — usually the person least equipped to arbitrate a technical disagreement. You need one person who does both. I do, every single week. Strategy call in the morning, production code by afternoon, code review for whoever else is building that evening. One brain, one context, no handoffs.
The Advisor in me
- Stack and infrastructure decisions costed per user, not per whiteboard
- Roadmap sequenced around acquisition cost and retention, not competitor features
- Developer and agency vetting — read the code before you sign the contract
- Scale planning for launch days, campaigns, and creator-driven traffic spikes
- Long-term technical vision that survives a Series A diligence
The Builder in me
- Ships production features end-to-end, every week
- Unblocks your in-house team or your agency mid-sprint
- Fixes the performance problem your users are posting about
- Builds the tricky third-party integration nobody wants to touch
- Reviews PRs from your team and opens them myself
When your advisor cannot open the repo, every disagreement between them and your builder lands on your desk as an opinion versus an opinion. One person who does both work streams removes the argument as well as the second invoice.
A working CTO who still writes the code
Strategy and shipping. Same person. Same week.
Most fractional CTOs available to LA founders will review your architecture, write a document, and recommend an agency to do the work. I won't. When something is broken the week of your launch, I open the editor and ship the fix myself — typically the same day.
I spent 4+ years as Executive Director of IT at Jacana Warranty, building the tech org from zero, hiring and managing developers, and reporting directly to the CEO. So I know what the leadership chair feels like. I also never gave up the builder's chair — and that's the half most fractional CTOs lost.
13+ years shipping production software across B2B SaaS, fintech, and warranty platforms. I know what breaks at 100 paying customers, at 10K, and at 100K, because I've written the code that had to survive each of those thresholds. Not in a deck. In production.
Shipping production software
Not just a dev — I've led teams
Vetted by the top freelance network
Still a working full-stack developer
This is NOT for you if…
I take a small number of clients at a time, so I'd rather decline a bad-fit engagement than take your retainer and disappoint you. Read these honestly. If any sound like you, we're probably not a match — and I'll save us both the call and tell you that upfront.
You're validating a weekend idea, not building a startup
If there's no business model, no plan to charge, and no first conversations with potential customers, you don't need a fractional CTO. You need a weekend, a notepad, and 5 customer interviews. Come back when there's a real reason to invest in engineering.
You want a technical co-founder for equity
Co-founders take equity, take risk, and commit to the company for years. I'm a paid advisor and builder — cash, not stock. If your pitch is "work for free until we raise," I'm not the right person, and I'd be skeptical of anyone in LA who says yes to that.
You want a 'set it and forget it' build
The founders I work with successfully show up to the weekly call, give fast decisions on Slack, and stay in the loop on tradeoffs. If you want to hand over a brief and come back to a finished product, you're better off hiring an agency. They'll quote you a price, build exactly the wrong thing, and you'll have nobody to blame but the brief.
You expect engineering to fix an audience problem
If nobody is using the product, more features rarely helps. Usually it's positioning, the offer, or the fact that the thing solves a problem people don't have. I can build whatever you describe, but I won't take your money to build version 4 of something the market already passed on at version 2. Be honest about what's actually broken.
5 free hours — then we decide if we keep going
Every engagement opens with 5 hours of real, billable-quality work that I do for free. An architecture audit, a review of the code your agency has delivered so far, a strategy call with concrete deliverables. No "discovery call" disguised as a sales pitch. You see the work product before you see an invoice. If we both want to continue, we pick a model.
Embedded with your LA team
$200–$1,200/week depending on hours
- Flexible weekly hours — anywhere from 5 to 30 hrs/week
- Weekly strategy call scheduled on Pacific time
- Async Slack/email — same-day response on weekdays
- Architecture reviews and hands-on shipping when needed
- Code reviews and 1:1s with your developers or your agency
- Roadmap planning, quarterly goals, hiring help
- Best for: ongoing technical partnership for an LA, Orange County, or San Diego startup
Fixed scope for a specific technical question
Fixed total quoted upfront — typically starting at $4,000
- Architecture audit before raising your seed or Series A
- Or: an independent review of what your agency has built so far
- Or: fixed-scope build sprint (specific feature, integration, or refactor)
- Fixed timeline — usually 6 to 12 weeks
- Fixed price quoted upfront, no scope creep
- Written report and recommendations you can hand to your board
- Best for: specific, time-bounded technical questions
Not sure whether your problem is recurring or one-time? Book the call. In 30 minutes I'll know whether you need ongoing technical leadership (retainer) or a one-shot project (architecture audit, agency code review, build sprint). And if it turns out you don't need a fractional CTO at all, I'll tell you that and recommend what you actually need.
Questions LA founders ask before hiring fractional
Direct answers from someone who works with Southern California teams remotely. No pitch.
Let's Build Your LA Startup's Technical Foundation
Book a free call. 30 minutes, on Pacific time. Tell me where you are — Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Orange County, San Diego, or anywhere else in Southern California — what's stuck, and what you're trying to reach. I'll tell you whether a fractional CTO is the right answer for your stage, and if it is, exactly what the first 5 free hours would deliver.
Elsewhere in California, or out of state? I also work with founders in San Francisco & the Bay Area, Texas (Austin, Dallas & Houston), and Seattle & Washington.
Outside Southern California? Start with the national overview of my fractional CTO for startups.