Technical leadership · consulting · advisory — Vienna
Most technical advisors start at the application layer. I start at the electrons and stop at the cloud — as one person who has owned the transitions in between.
Technical Leadership
Fractional or interim CTO
Technical Consulting
A scoped engagement
Technical Advisory
Advisory board and due diligence
The difference
Both are legitimate. They are just not the same job, not the same role, and not the same person.
Solves throughput. The backlog gets shorter and the team moves faster.
Solves direction. The expensive mistakes rarely happen inside a function — they happen in an architecture, an interface, a supplier, or a hire.
If you need both, start with direction. You can buy the capacity more precisely afterwards — and usually cheaper.
How we work
Technical leadership for products made of hardware and software. Pick the situation, not the title.
01
Fractional or interim CTO
I take the role, not just the question: set direction, decide the architecture, lead the team, and represent the technology to management and investors.
WhenWhen technical decisions are due and nobody owns them.
02
A scoped engagement
One question, one deadline, one result. No open-ended retainer and no eighty slides — an answer solid enough that you can work from it without me.
WhenWhen the question is specific and the deadline is close.
03
Advisory board and due diligence
An independent technical judgement for people about to put money on technology — with no interest of my own in who builds it afterwards.
WhenWhen a round, an acquisition or a governance gap is coming up.
How we start
Nobody hands a leadership mandate to someone they don't know yet. So every engagement starts with a piece of work that is worth something on its own — and that either side can walk away from.
Two to four weeks, clearly scoped. I work through the system, the team, the roadmap, the suppliers and the risks, and write up where you actually stand, with the findings in priority order.
ResultA document that stays useful even if we never speak again.
You decide on scope and rhythm — or against it. No automatic renewal, no minimum term, no follow-up calls.
ResultClarity on both sides, with nobody having to sell anything.
A fixed rhythm, clear ownership, decisions written down. One to two days a week covers most mandates.
ResultDecisions get made instead of postponed.
Most people start at step one. It costs you a few weeks and leaves you with an honest outside read on where you stand — whichever way you go afterwards.
Request a position fixSuccession
Plenty of companies would rather grow technical leadership in-house than buy it indefinitely. That is the right instinct. It rarely fails on willingness — it fails because the person meant to grow into the role has nobody to measure themselves against.
A good mandate ends with someone in-house holding the role. Anything else is a subscription.
Where the depth comes from
Over fifteen years of technology — detector electronics at CERN, enterprise software at umdasch Group, and a SaaS company of my own as CTO. I have laid out boards, written firmware, brought up FPGAs, owned architectures, and read cloud bills nobody in the building could explain. So when something breaks, I can usually tell which layer it is in — and, more usefully, which layer it is not in.
See the full CVWhat I don't know, I pick up faster than you could hire for it.
Thirty minutes, no obligation. Afterwards you'll know whether I'm useful to you — and I'll tell you if I'm not.