Hi, I'm Chris: founder, CTO, and coach.
I have spent the last 25 years starting things. Building tech teams, founding startups, and helping other founders and CTOs succeed. My aim is to make startups that make this world better for my kids generation to grow up in.
I offer fractional CTO services and technical leadership coaching to help startups build great teams and scale effectively.
I started in tech in 2000 as a programmer at Elixir Studios, making games and learning how to code and lead teams. After that I founded a software agency called Eden Development, where I first began learning how to build and run a company.
I helped build GOV.UK in the early days, trained hundreds of developers in software skills at the BBC, and led a small team that made Sol Trader which was released on Steam in 2016.
In 2017 I joined Gower Street as CTO and helped scale the team from 5 to 50 people, leading a large film analysis + engineering team building prediction tools for major film studios. In 2021 I co-founded Cherrypick as CTO, building an AI-powered grocery shopping assistant to help people eat better effortlessly.
I split my time between Cherrypick and helping other startups through:
- Fractional CTO services for startups needing experienced technical leadership
- Technical leadership coaching for CTOs wanting to level up their skills
You can find me on BlueSky, X and LinkedIn. Here are some of my more recent articles - subscribe with RSS to keep up with the latest.
How To Get Clarity With a New Tech Team
You have just taken over a new tech team. There is pressure to deliver, not much signal, and everything feels urgent. Perhaps the roadmap is packed. Perhaps the team seems busy. But is anything really working?
This is your field manual. If you are overwhelmed and trying to get clarity, start here.
Read moreCoding with AI: How To Do It Well And What This Means
I am shipping AI-first production code every day. Not experimental features. Not throwaway prototypes. Real, deployed, mission-critical code powering Cherrypick’s tens of thousands of users.
Social media overflows with “vibe coding” demonstrations. These flashy but superficial examples show AI apparently conjuring perfect code in seconds. The reality of professional AI-assisted development runs much deeper. Real production work with AI is messier, more nuanced, and demands rigorous thinking, but very effective.
This is not about magical code generation. It is about a new way of thinking about development. It requires substantial real-world development experience to do well: the onus is upon those of us with this experience to teach the next generation how to harness these tools effectively.
This is how I am doing it, what it all might mean, and how we can help others find the way.
Read moreHow To Avoid Bad Startup Culture
If you are not paying attention to your startup culture, I have news for you: you are already building a culture into your company. Chances are that is not the culture you want.
Every company has a culture. It is a summation of all the habits and practices that make up the work. It is every choice, good or bad, made by every person involved. Every action sets a precedent, a “how we do things here.”
This is how we are wired. We are naturally social beings and are strongly predisposed to fit in to the group we find ourselves in, and to emulate their behaviour. This reinforces culture further, and compounds when more people are involved.
A culture grows like plants in a garden. You cannot stop the life from growing, but you can decide how and where it grows. Left unattended, weeds will grow alongside the flowers. The key is recognising this and putting in the work to shape it.
Here is a quick primer on how to do the minimum to avoid bad culture, and how to get good culture going with a little attention every so often.
Read moreSee the Archive for more articles.