Hey, I'm Ryan. I'm a technical advisor in beautiful Portland, Maine. I help founders and product teams figure out what to build, what not to build, and how to stop making engineering guess. I've sat in the founder seat, raised a seed round, and learned what breaks when ambition outruns clarity.
I work with founders and growing teams who need senior technical judgment but don't yet need to put a full-time CTO on payroll.
I earn my keep when the app exists, the stakes are climbing, and the next step has stopped being obvious. Sometimes the fix is strategy. Sometimes it's teaching the team the words for what they actually want. Sometimes it's me getting on the keyboard.
The best time to call me is right before motion starts pretending to be progress.
The prototype works, but the AI keeps fixing one thing by breaking another, and you're running out of words to describe what you actually want. Maybe an agency built v1 instead. Either way, it's real enough to matter and messy enough to need a plan.
With AI, engineers are sometimes productive enough to build features you never asked for. I help separate useful work from impressive-looking work, so nobody spends two weeks on the thing one customer will use.
Sales is selling a new enterprise feature, engineering is perfecting a legacy tool for one user, and product is stuck in the middle. I get everyone in the room, translate between them, and help the business stop playing telephone with itself.
How I help
It usually starts with a question that's gotten too important to keep answering loosely.
What should we build? What should we stop building? How do we get sales, product, and engineering pointed at the same target?
Senior technical judgment without the full salary, benefits, and equity of a CTO you may not need 40 hours of yet. I plug in when the technical calls matter and a wrong hire would be expensive to unwind.
Workshops, roadmap shaping, and translation across teams using the same words to mean slightly different things. The goal: your CEO, sales lead, product lead, and a random engineer all describe the business the same way. You'd be surprised how often they don't.
A practical look at the codebase, data model, deployment path, and team process, aimed at wherever progress keeps getting sticky. For when features drag across sprints, AI fixes one bug by creating two, or deployment has quietly become a haunted house.
A clear-eyed read before a raise, a hire, an AI bet, or any decision with real consequences. I've built AI products and set internal AI practices, so you get fewer case studies and more contact with reality.
A typical first pass
Start by making the mess visible.
We go through the app, the sales story, the roadmap, and the places where progress keeps getting stuck.
I look at the codebase, data model, architecture, deployment path, team process, and customer signal.
We decide what to build, what not to build, what to fix first, and how to explain it so the team can move.
I facilitate, teach, review, and lead engineers. When the strategy needs hands on the keyboard, I'll write the TypeScript, Node, and React too. Building isn't the headline, but it pays the bills and keeps me honest.
Not a menu of fractional CTO hours. A few ways to connect product ambition, technical choices, GTM reality, and the work that actually ships.
The right shape comes down to whether you want regular backup, someone in the work with you, or one hard look at a single consequential question.
Scope
When
You want regular strategic backup, but a full-time technical executive is premature.
Role
A senior partner across product, engineering, GTM, hiring, and AI: weighing tradeoffs, sharpening priorities, and keeping the technical story tied to the business it's supposed to serve.
Output
Clearer decisions, tighter sequencing, and a lot fewer moments where engineering has to guess what actually matters.
Scope
When
You need someone inside the work: aligning teams, shaping roadmap, guiding engineers, or holding the line while you sort out permanent leadership.
Role
I slot into the operating rhythm: clarifying priorities, reviewing architecture, unblocking delivery, and building where it genuinely moves the strategy.
Output
A narrower roadmap, a calmer team, and motion in a direction you actually chose.
Scope
When
One knotty problem needs a focused assessment: architecture risk, product direction, AI-built prototype limits, diligence prep, hiring plan, roadmap confusion, or team drag.
Role
A practical pass through the product, codebase, architecture, team, and the business pressure sitting behind the question.
Output
A straight read on what's real, what's risky, which tradeoffs matter, and what to do next.
About
Most recently I founded Rally, an AI GTM company that turned sales collateral, discovery calls, and customer context into landing pages, deal rooms, coaching, and research. I raised a seed round, lived inside the AI startup economy, and learned firsthand what breaks when ambition outruns clarity. That includes a few features nobody should have built.
I'm not an MBA citing case studies. I've been in the investor meeting and had my paycheck depend on making things happen. Before Rally I led web application, workflow, and live video work at companies from scrappy startups to public-company scale, including principal engineer at Robin and lead engineer on Brightcove's live video platform. I know the difference between a system that's solid and one held together with rubber bands and prayer.
It doesn't need to be neatly packaged. Send the prototype, the weird bug, the roadmap, the AI slop, the pitch deck you're nervous about, or the team that's quietly not talking to each other.
If I can help, we'll figure out how fast. If I can't, I'll tell you, and probably point you at someone who can.
A useful first note might include:
First call: 30 minutes, no ceremony. We talk through the situation, separate the symptoms from the actual problem, and land on a useful next step.