Technology leadership for the messy middle.
I'm Brad Hefta-Gaub, a fractional CTO. For more than thirty years I've helped founders set strategy, build and lead teams, and ship software that scales. I'm as at home in the boardroom as in the codebase, and I still write code when it moves the work forward. I bring clarity, structure, and calm execution to the stretch where things are unclear and fragile.
Senior technical leadership, without the full-time hire.
I embed in your team and own the technology outcomes: strategy, architecture, security, hiring, and delivery. You get a CTO who joins the hard conversations and is just as comfortable in the codebase as in the boardroom.
Advisory
Monthly retainer for steady guidance and accountability. A senior sounding board on call.
Fractional
Part-time executive leadership inside your team, owning the technology roadmap and the people who deliver it.
Project
A defined initiative with clear outcomes, budget, and timeline. We agree on the finish line up front.
A few things I've built and helped build.
Helped grow RealNetworks from 20 people to more than 1,500 and an IPO, building the core technology of streaming media.
Built the first behavioral ad-targeting platform, running billions of transactions a day.
Worked with dozens of founders to get their ideas off the ground, raising more than $100M in venture rounds.
Scaled platforms to millions of users, and modernized brittle systems without stopping delivery.
Artificer Innovations ships its own products.
Building products keeps me sharp on the work I advise clients on. A shared foundation and a small, senior team let one practice run several at once. If you arrived here from one of these, you've found the shop behind it.
And experiments in the open.
Open source tools and early ideas. Some stay small. Others grow up and move to Ventures.
For most clients the work is strategy, leadership, and the hard calls, not the keyboard. I still write code and debug the tough problems when that's the fastest way forward, and the best technology decisions come from people who trust each other enough to wrestle with hard problems and stay aligned when the path isn't clear.
I've spent years in the mountains as an avalanche educator and a search-and-rescue responder, making calls with incomplete information and real consequences. That's the same steadiness I bring to scaling a system or preparing a founder for a raise.
I co-host How Many CTOs Does It Take?, a podcast on what it takes to scale technical teams, and I keep a candid guide to how I work alongside a team.
Read the User's Manual →Tell me where you are, and where you want to go.
Every company's path is different. If you're weighing fractional leadership, an advisory relationship, or a scoped project, let's talk.