This is an Open Coffee for Fractionals session — part of my coaching practice.

Michael Payne joined for the first time and shared what it’s like going from consulting architect to fractional CTO — mostly solo, mostly govtech, mostly East Texas.

Adam White came in hot with a new positioning experiment: Technical Waste Management. His pitch? Let your best engineers build — I’ll clean up everything else.

Stephen Lauck mapped the CTO spectrum into three types: the fixer, the tech lead, and the customer-facing business mind.

We got into:

• who fixes your AI MVP when it breaks?
• why positioning around risk (not hours) helps sell retainers
• how isolation makes nontechnical founders seek fractional partners
• why companies don’t hire juniors (and how that breaks the pipeline)
• how trades and tech both cling to the hourly myth — and what to do instead
• retainers as risk transfer: you’re not paying for time, you’re paying to not hold the bag when stuff breaks

No slides. No pitches. No agenda. Just honest conversation.

📅 Recorded June 30, 2025
🎙️ Hosted by David Raistrick

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