Decisions that feel fine at pre-seed become anchors at Series A. Platform choices, first hires, AI integration, each one compounds the ones before it. By Series B, most founders realize they needed a senior voice three months earlier. This is that voice, earlier.
The tech stack that moved fast at pre-seed becomes a velocity ceiling at scale. By Series A, migration costs six figures and three months of lost momentum. The right moment to revisit is before the team is stalled. Before you're fighting your own platform.
The first five engineers set the ceiling. One senior hire who can mentor compounds differently than five generalists. A misread here costs you eighteen months of rebuild later. Get it right and the team scales like it was designed.
The demo works. Production is another story. Data quality, latency, cost per inference, hallucination handling, skip any one and you ship a feature that costs more than it makes or doesn't work at scale.
Monthly retainer. Weekly call, architecture reviews, hiring decisions, board prep. Saksham stays close to the rhythm of the company without the salary impact of a full-time hire. Most founders eventually hire a CTO. Consult Saksham designs the role and the search.
Three to four weeks. Deep look at platform, data, and delivery architecture. You get a prioritized roadmap that your team can actually execute, plus an honest assessment of where you're building debt.
Four to six weeks. What data you actually have. Which vendors work at your scale. Cost per inference. Whether your idea is real or a PoC demo. Hands-on through first production deployment.
Two to three weeks. What roles you actually need. Interview design that works. Hiring sequence that builds momentum. Optional: Saksham runs interview panels for the first hires.
Thirty minutes. No pitch.
Five business days. Shape of engagement.
Principal on the work day one.
Recommendation with execution path.
The full-time hire is premature. At Series A, a full-time CTO is often the wrong hire at the wrong burn rate. You need the judgment, not the headcount. You need someone who can spend two hours on your hardest call and then disappear until you need them again.
The fractional alternative. Consult Saksham delivers senior judgment at a fraction of the cost, without runway commitment. Weekly calls. Real skin in the decision. When you're ready for a full-time CTO, the practice designs the role, runs the search, and hands off cleanly.
The end game. Most founders eventually hire a CTO. That's the correct outcome. The advisory relationship gets you to that point with the right decision architecture already in place.
Engineering velocity was collapsing under its own weight. Four payment microservices had grown tangled, stepping on each other constantly. Latency was climbing. The CTO knew something had to give but didn't know whether to rebuild, consolidate, or rearchitect.
Saksham led a three-week assessment that answered the hardest question first: consolidation was right, not replatforming. The output included the consolidation plan, vendor selection for the messaging layer, and a twelve-week execution roadmap that kept feature work alive through the migration. Acropolis executed.
Churn was ticking up. The founders couldn't tell if it was a product problem or infrastructure. Saksham dug in and found it: a data pipeline silently dropping events upstream. The analytics that were supposed to guide the product were built on bad data. Three weeks to 99.97% reliability, and suddenly the team could see what was actually broken.
Most commonly when an architecture or platform decision is coming up that will be expensive to reverse, or when engineering hiring is imminent and the founder does not yet have the seniority in-house to calibrate it.
Anywhere from a four-week scoped architecture review to a six-month fractional CTO retainer. Most engagements fall between two and twelve weeks.
It can bridge the gap. For founders not yet at the stage where a full-time CTO is the right hire, fractional advisory gives access to senior judgment without the burn rate commitment.
Selectively, usually around specific decisions: initial platform choice, first engineering hires, or AI strategy before Series A.
Engineering consultancies execute. The advisory practice decides what should be executed. When execution is needed, it is paired with Acropolis under the same principal.
Yes. Mutual NDAs are signed routinely before sensitive first calls.
The first conversation is thirty minutes. By the end of it, the shape of the engagement is clear.