Your CTO, for two quarters.
Then your CTO's onboarding doc.
We become the technical co-founder for 6–12 months, build the thing with you, and then hand the keys to the hire we helped you find. These are the terms, in writing, before the handshake.
- Read
- 13 min
- Last updated
- March 2026
- By
- Theo Vasquez, partner
- Stage
- Pre-seed → Seed founders, pre-technical-hire
You raised. You have eighteen months of runway and a deck full of arrows pointing up and to the right. You also do not have a CTO, you have never had one, and the person you most want to hire just took a job at Anthropic. This is the engagement for that situation, and that situation only. We do two of these a year. We have said no to roughly forty.
A partnership is the most committed thing we do and the most committed thing we ask. We're not staff augmentation. We're not a fractional CTO. We move into the company for two to four quarters, we build the product with you, we hire our replacement, and we leave. Those four nouns are load-bearing. If any of them feels wrong, this is not the right engagement.
§ 01 — The thesisThe transition is the product.
Most founder–vendor relationships end badly because they were never designed to end. Ours is designed to end from day one. Every line of code we write is written so the eventual CTO can read it on their second Monday. Every architecture choice is one we'd defend to that person, in person, because we'll be the ones introducing them.
“We're not the CTO. We're the bridge between the founder and the CTO.”
We have introduced six of our clients to their permanent technical lead. We've been in the room for the offer. We've stayed for the first month after they joined, then ramped down to a weekly call, then to nothing. Two of those CTOs now refer work back to us. That's the loop we're trying to build, and it only works if we leave cleanly.
- ✓One partner, full-time on youNot a roster. A named human, in your Slack, in your standups, on your offsites.
- ✓The product, built with youNot built for you. You're in the codebase, in the review, in the deploys.
- ✓The first two engineering hiresWe write the JD, we run the loop, we make the offer with you in the room.
- ✓An onboarding doc for the next CTOMaintained from week one. The reason the handover is one Monday, not one quarter.
- ✓Investor updates we cosignWhen the technical section is honest, the rest of the update gets believed.
- ✓A ramp-down month, freeThe month after your CTO starts. We hand things off in person, then we leave.
§ 03 — How it goesFour phases, two-to-four quarters.
The default length is nine months. We've done six, we've done twelve, we won't do fifteen. The phases overlap on purpose: the hiring work starts before the product is done, because finding the right CTO is the part nobody schedules for and the part that always runs late.
Roughly two-thirds of partnerships end on schedule. The other third extend by a named quarter — usually because the hiring market was slower than we forecast, not because the build was. We've never extended a partnership past 14 months. Three months in, we will tell you whether we think we're trending toward an on-time finish, and you'll have the option to renegotiate or unwind. We do not believe in sunk-cost contracts.
§ 05 — The catchWhat this costs you.
Partnerships are $32k/month cash plus 0.5–1.5% equity, vesting monthly over the engagement, with a one-year cliff that triggers on signing (not on closing). The equity is non-negotiable but the range is — it's lower for shorter engagements and for companies that have already raised a priced round. The cash is what one senior engineer would cost you fully loaded. The equity is what makes us care about the third year.
We do two partnerships at a time, no more, and we plan them six months out. If we say yes today, the start date is probably September. You can read our standard partnership agreement in advance, or tell us what you're building. The first call is forty-five minutes and ends with a yes, a no, or a referral. We don't do maybes.