8–12 week engagements. Fixed fee. I find what's stuck, install the fix, and leave you with a team that runs better.
No fee conversation, no commitment. Just 45 minutes to see if there's a real conversation to have.
Alex Raihelgaus
Founder's Advisor
Founders and CEOs of companies in two phases
The model and architecture are in place, the team is small. The next set of decisions - architecture, hiring, leadership patterns, what to delegate to whom - is the difference between a product that scales and one that calcifies.
Engineering shipped fast at the start, but somewhere the velocity broke. Roadmaps slip. New hires take six months to be useful. Bug rates climb. The team looks busy and ships less. You're not sure if it's people, process, architecture, or strategy.
Cross-vertical: fintech, healthcare, cybersecurity, ecommerce, B2B SaaS, B2C, web3, mobility, AI, ad-tech. The underlying problem is the same in all of them - software that can't move with the business.
I'm a founder's advisor - not a fractional CTO, not a contractor, not a head of engineering for hire.
Founders bring me in when something in the business has stopped moving forward, and they can't tell whether the cause sits in strategy, product, engineering, team, or sales. My background spans all of those:
I diagnose what's actually stuck, design and install the fix, and leave you with a business that's moving again. Then I leave.
8–12 weeks. Fixed fee. Defined scope.
Two weeks
I work with you and your team to find where the actual gap sits. Often it's not where you think.
Two to four weeks
I name the fix, scope it, and we agree on what changes and what doesn't.
Four to six weeks
I do the work alongside your team - not as a feature dev, as the person installing the foundation.
Final week or two
Your team owns it. I leave.
Same patterns, different domains. The fintech rebuild informs the cyber architecture informs the healthtech rollout.
Eleven of them shown above. The full list is longer.
Opinions, field notes, and the occasional argument with myself.
DDD, OKRs, Lean Startup, Jobs to Be Done - your team has read the books. The problem was never the frameworks. It was enforcement. Nobody had the discipline or the headcount to actually keep a company aligned to them. AI changes that equation.
Your team is busy. Nothing ships. The fix isn't a better stack, a faster build, or one more standup. It's the translation layer between business need and technical execution - and almost nobody is actually working on it.
The OpenClaw CLI boots a full Node.js runtime on every terminal open to generate static shell completions. A simple caching strategy with auto-invalidation eliminates the 3.7-second hit entirely.
Subscribe and I'll send you one piece a month on the practical side of running technical orgs - architecture decisions, velocity diagnoses, hiring traps. The cold path to working together is reading me first.
Your email goes straight to me. No third-party newsletter service. Unsubscribe by replying with the word "stop." That's the whole opt-out flow.
If something in your business has stopped moving forward and you can't tell why - that's the conversation I want.
No fee, no pitch, no commitment. Just 45 minutes to see if there's a real engagement here.