Ship Faster. Win Your Market. Scale With Confidence.
Your startup has product-market fit and momentum — but your engineering team can't keep up. I embed as your fractional CTO to eliminate execution risk, accelerate delivery with AI-powered engineering, and give you the advantage you need to win.
- UserTesting.com 2nd engineer. Built the engineering foundation, grew the team, and helped take the company to IPO.
- Guru (GetGuru.com) VP of Engineering. Scaled the team, improved engineering processes, and drove platform growth.
- Spekit CTO / SVP R&D. Inherited a 3-week manual release cycle and got the team shipping multiple times per day with higher quality.
- +7 Other Startups From seed-stage to Series C across Silicon Valley — spanning SaaS, marketplace, and consumer tech. A wide breadth of experience building and scaling engineering teams in high-growth environments.
- Startup Slipstream Now helping founders at every stage fix execution risk and build high-performing engineering teams. Creator of IterationIQ, the free team diagnostic built on The Compounding Team framework.
A Founder-Tested Leader Who Delivers Results — Fast
Founders hire me because I've been in the trenches. I've built companies from scratch, joined as the 2nd engineer at a company that went to IPO, and stepped into struggling engineering orgs as CTO to turn them around. Today, I help teams leverage AI to ship faster and do more with less. I know what it takes to win — and I know how to get your team there.
I'm not a consultant who hands you a deck and walks away. I embed with your team, take ownership, and drive execution. Founders I've worked with will tell you: the impact is fast, and the improvements stick long after.
Uplevel What Matters Most — Fast
Your competitors aren't waiting — and they're using AI to move even faster. Whether it's your technology, your AI strategy, your leaders, or your team — I find the leverage point and drive transformation that sticks.
Uplevel Your Technology & Product
Fix the architecture, release pipeline, and quality issues that are slowing you down. Integrate AI-assisted development to multiply your team's output. Go from painful multi-week cycles to shipping multiple times a day with confidence.
Uplevel Your Leadership & Strategy
Develop engineering leaders who don't need you in the room. Sharpen decision-making, bring executive-level clarity to the roadmap, and build the strategic muscle your org is missing.
Uplevel Your Team & Culture
Turn a struggling team into one that ships with confidence. Install the hiring practices, velocity metrics, and engineering culture that let you scale from 5 to 50 without breaking.
AI-Powered Engineering Acceleration
Your team should be shipping 2–3x faster with AI — but most aren't. I help you adopt AI-assisted development, automate workflows, and build an AI strategy that actually compounds — so you ship more with the team you have.
How I Turned Spekit's Engineering Into a Competitive Advantage
When Spekit's founder brought me in as CTO, the team was stuck: quality issues were eroding customer trust, and a 3-week release cycle meant they couldn't compete. Here's how we turned it around.
⚠ Before
- ✗ 3-week manual release cycle
- ✗ Major product quality & performance issues
- ✗ Manual, error-prone infrastructure
- ✗ Low team morale & organizational confidence
- ✗ Slow, unpredictable delivery
✓ After
- ✓ Multiple releases per day
- ✓ Dramatically higher product quality
- ✓ Automated CI/CD & infrastructure
- ✓ Team thriving, org confidence restored
- ✓ Fast, predictable, high-quality delivery
"Paul stepped in at a critical moment and took ownership of our entire R&D organization—product, design, and engineering. He brought clarity, structure, and calm to a very complex environment, and helped us move from reactive problem-solving to focused, confident execution. His leadership fundamentally changed how we built and delivered product at Spekit."
What Founders Say About Working With Paul
I've partnered with founders at every stage — from pre-seed to IPO. Here's what they have to say.
Paul was an incredible partner during a key growth phase at Guru. He helped us stabilize the product, strengthen our engineering practices, and scale the team in a way that increased throughput without sacrificing quality. His impact was felt quickly, and the improvements he drove continued to pay dividends long after.
As UserTesting grew toward becoming a much larger, more complex company, Paul played a critical role in helping us evolve our technology and engineering practices to meet that challenge. He combined strong technical judgment with a deep understanding of execution and people, and his contributions helped position the company for long-term success.
Paul has been the most impactful head of engineering I have ever worked with. He gave us a plan and a timeline, and did exactly what he set out to do — transforming our development process from two-week sprints to CI/CD and significantly reducing bugs. Metrics driven, results oriented. I couldn't be more happy with what he has done for our company.
Built for Founders Who Move Fast
No six-month ramp-up. No bloated SOWs. You get a battle-tested engineering leader embedded with your team, driving results in weeks.
Founder Discovery Call
We talk founder-to-founder about where your company is, what's slowing you down, and what winning looks like. I'll give you an honest take on where I can move the needle fastest.
Embed & Diagnose
I embed with your team and rapidly assess your engineering processes, release pipeline, team dynamics, and infrastructure. Within two weeks, you get a clear action plan tied to business outcomes.
Execute & Accelerate
I take ownership and drive execution — exactly what I did at UserTesting, Guru, and Spekit. You see measurable improvement in velocity, quality, and team confidence within weeks.
The Compounding Team
How small disciplines build a company that wins.
After 25+ years and 10+ startups, I wrote down the patterns that separate teams that compound from teams that stall. Six patterns, measured by a free diagnostic, with a first move for each.
Your Next Growth Phase Starts With the Right Engineering Leader
Book a free 30-minute founder discovery call. Tell me what's holding your team back, and I'll tell you exactly how I'd fix it — the same way I did for the founders at UserTesting, Guru, and Spekit.
Book Your Free Discovery Call →