Fractional CTO for founders building with AI.
You’re building with AI, and the technical decisions are stacking up faster than the team that can make them. I’m Elliott Garcea. I co-founded 10KC, spent eleven years as its CTO building an AI-powered mentorship platform, and sold the company for $100 million. Now I do that work for a few clients at a time, from architecture to the parts of the job a slide deck can’t fix.
What I do
| Fractional CTO | Founders, seed to Series B | Executive technology leadership for the stretch where you need the seat filled but not the salary. Architecture, roadmap, hiring, and the board conversation, from someone who has held the seat. |
|---|---|---|
| AI product strategy | Founders & product leaders | What to build with AI, what to skip, and the architecture to ship it. I built a recommendation engine into a product people paid for. I know where the demos end and the work begins. |
| Investor due diligence | PE & VC | Technical and AI diligence on the company you’re about to back. A written verdict on the code, the team, and the claims, with the reasoning shown. |
| AI enablement & change management | Operators | Getting a real organization to use AI in its daily work. Tools and workflow first, then the harder problem: changing how people work, so the tooling spend shows up in throughput, not just invoices. |
| Turnaround | Boards & investors | When product and engineering have stalled, I step in, find what’s broken, and get the ship moving again. It’s people more often than architecture. |
Where this comes from
Before 10KC I led fifty-plus engineers at Xtreme Labs through its acquisitions into Pivotal and VMware. Before that, Apple as an operations engineer, and New Product Development at Toyota, where Lean became muscle memory. Computer engineering at the University of Waterloo underneath it all.
Intelligent systems only matter when a real organization ships them. That’s the part I do.
For investors
Due diligence before the deal. Turnarounds after. If you’re evaluating a company’s technology or its AI story, or holding one that’s stalled, that work has its own page.
One call tells you if this fits.
Thirty minutes on what you’re building, no charge, no deck. If I’m not the right person, I’ll say so and point you at who is.