Sky Therapeutics

This was a full fractional-CTO-plus engagement, not an advisory slot. Concretely:

Strategic roadmap. I designed the full 6/12/18/24-month technical plan: MVP scoping and timing, what the team needed to exist at each stage, what infrastructure decisions had to be made first so later decisions stayed cheap to reverse, and what the commercial-scale version of the platform would require that the MVP version could defer.

Infrastructure from the ground up. Cloud architecture, budget modeling, the small-and-scalable version of each system so we weren't paying enterprise costs for MVP traffic while still being able to grow without rewrites. Docker and Kubernetes from the start so the production story was coherent before the team got large enough for that to become a migration project.

Team structure and hiring. Hired and onboarded a team of engineers inside six months. Designed the technical interviews and assessments, set the calibration standards, and did the interviews myself. When the roadmap included game-based therapeutic content built in Unity, I learned C# and Unity in about a week and a half in order to run the technical interviews for those hires credibly — built a few proof-of-concept games during platform discovery (evaluating Unity versus Unreal versus others) to verify I understood the stack well enough to evaluate candidates against it.

Platform architecture and HIPAA compliance. Led the cross-platform migration that doubled the addressable user base, built the accessibility layer into the frontend, and kept HIPAA compliance intact throughout.

Commercial support. Sat in on the relevant conversations where real technical questions needed real technical answers.

The founders ultimately chose not to pursue the original direction. Market conditions during the engagement were difficult; funding was in place and the trajectory was workable, but they decided it wasn't the right moment to execute and stepped back from the company. The IP continues under different stewardship, at smaller scale than the original plan, with my original contact carrying it forward.

I'm transparent about that because I think it matters. The work I did was the work the engagement called for — the roadmap shipped, the infrastructure shipped, the team was built and delivered, the MVP architecture was sound. The decision not to push forward commercially wasn't a reflection of the engineering; it was a founder-level call about risk tolerance and market timing. Those are different things and I'd rather say so than gloss over it.

This engagement is the closest direct analog to what the Fractional CTO service offers today, at roughly the most intensive end of the engagement spectrum.