Invest & advise
I back early teams — with capital, or with time.
Beyond consulting, I work with a small number of early-stage companies in two ways: as an angel investor writing small checks, and as a Fractional CTO embedding into teams that need senior technical leadership without the full-time hire.
Angel investing
Capital + conviction
A small check — €20–30k — and genuine engagement with what you’re building. I don’t invest passively.
Fractional CTO
Time + equity
Senior technical leadership, part-time, for equity. For founders who need a technical co-pilot before they can hire one full-time.
Where I focus
01 —
Automation
Workflows, process intelligence, software that removes the toil from work.
02 —
Energy
Grid software, storage, efficiency tooling. The infrastructure layer of the energy transition.
03 —
Cloud & infra
Developer tooling, observability, distributed systems, platform engineering.
Not limited to pure tech startups. What I look for is teams that take engineering seriously — founders who understand that how you build matters as much as what you build.
The details
| Angel investing | |
| Stage | Pre-seed and seed — before product-market fit |
| Ticket size | €20–30k per company |
| Geography | Wherever talented and motivated teams are |
| Structure | SAFE or convertible note preferred — I keep it simple |
| Fractional CTO | |
| Engagement | Part-time, typically 1–2 days per week |
| Compensation | Equity-based — cash optional, skin in the game required |
| Scope | Architecture decisions, hiring the first engineers, building the technical culture, vendor choices, roadmap trade-offs |
| Stage fit | Pre-seed to Series A — before you need a full-time CTO |
What I bring
Hands-on technical depth. I can read your architecture, flag hidden complexity, and help make pragmatic decisions before they become expensive ones.
Early-stage pattern recognition. I’ve worked across startups and established teams as Founding Engineer, SRE, and DevOps. I know where things break early.
Open-source & community networks. Former Docker Captain, CNCF Ambassador, contributor to Kubernetes, InfluxDB, and others.
Founder-to-founder candor. I run ShippingBytes myself. I won’t pretend the hard parts are easy.
Get in touch
The garage door is open.
Whether you’re looking for a check, a technical co-pilot, or both — reach out. A paragraph about what you’re building and what kind of help you need is enough to start.
info@shippingbytes.com · subject: "Angel — [one line]" or "Fractional CTO — [one line]"
I read everything and respond personally. No forms, no assistants.