Brad Hefta-Gaub
Fractional CTO and builder. For more than thirty-five years I've guided startups and growth companies through their hardest moments, from the early days of streaming media to building with AI today.
Product vision, pragmatic engineering, and human connection.
I help founders set strategy, build and lead teams, and align technology with business outcomes, including how to put agents inside a real engineering process instead of treating AI as autocomplete. With many clients my work is the boardroom and the team, not the codebase. I still write code and debug the tough problems when it helps, and I believe the best solutions come from teams who trust each other enough to wrestle with hard problems and stay aligned through the unknown.
I also co-host How Many CTOs?, a podcast where I talk with fellow leaders about what it really takes to scale technical teams.
I've lived the full spectrum of startup life.
Greenfield builds, rapid pivots, scaling pains, and the occasional two in the morning production fire. I've held a lot of titles, CTO, CEO, lead engineer, but I'm proudest of the teams I've helped build and the products they delivered under pressure.
- Turned around a 98point6 engineering organization that had missed SLAs for six consecutive quarters, hitting 100% attainment in five of the next six.
- Led product engineering for a healthcare platform that used AI to help practitioners care for patients, with HIPAA and SOC 2 controls for protected health data.
- 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.
- Built engineering organizations that balance speed and sustainability.
What draws me in, time and again, is the messy middle, the stretch when things are unclear and fragile. That's when I show up best, bringing clarity, structure, and calm execution so teams can keep moving forward.
Full résumé →Where failure isn't theoretical.
I'm an ultrarunner, skier, and avalanche educator, and I respond with a search-and-rescue team. Years in the mountains have shaped how I lead: operating in uncertainty, making decisions with incomplete data, and managing risk when the stakes are real.
Whether I'm scaling infrastructure or preparing a founder for a raise, I bring endurance, humility, and a steady hand to the work.
Success isn't the summit or the ship date. It's the team you bring with you, and the systems you leave behind for others to build on.
If you want to understand how I work alongside a team, I keep a candid, evolving guide to it.
Read the User's Manual →Every company's path is different.
If you're weighing fractional leadership, an advisory relationship, or a scoped project, let's talk.