How I Can Help!

I work with technical early-stage founders—and their teams—to learn the unspoken rules of the venture-backed startup world.

I run a "Startup 101" for former engineers who have just raised (or are about to raise) for the first time.
Additionally, I work with a small number of companies as a consultant, focusing on engineers and their leaders.

Why am I qualified?

Hey! I'm Yasyf. Former CTO & 3x venture-backed founder with an exit. I've:

  • spent my career as an engineer, manager, and founder
  • built complex systems---HIPAA-compliant chat and a runtime for automation workflows, to name a couple---at scale
  • grown engineering teams from just myself to 20+ engineers, with managers, designers, and product to support them
  • raised 10s of millions of dollars for deep software cos
  • designed the interview loop used for evaluating engineers at several startups
  • taught engineers how to be founders!
  • scaled organizations from pre-seed to series A: ops, engineering and talent, and more

...and I'd like to help you do the same! I'm currently have a few slots to bring on companies for some consulting work.

If you'd like to see what it's like to work with me, your best bet is to check out these founder references.

Example projects

Here are some of the projects I've helped companies with so far.

Talent

  • Help design and tweak the interview loop for engineers to ensure we're actually testing for the qualities we value.
  • Help us figure out how to implement a recruiting system to start pulling people out of our network in.

Mentorship

  • I'm an eng (manager) who now has to run a company. I need someone to vent at and run things by.
  • I was an engineer at a bigger company and am struggling to adjust to startup culture.
  • I'm a founder and need to strategize my next fundraise in these choppy markets.
  • I'm not sure what hire I need to make to solve my current problem.

Code

  • Do some code reviews on our PRs weekly to provide the input of a senior engineer.
  • Audit our code for performance or security.
  • Advise us on how to best architect or implement this hairy feature.
  • Get this stupid CI/CD system working!
  • I can't figure out how to do X in Rails.

Product

  • Help review our design for this API or SDK!
  • We need to distribute a CLI.
  • We need someone to look through our developer docs.

Fast facts

You can expect my rates to be similar to the pro-rated salary of a VPE. If you're a portfolio company of mine, it will be closer to that of a senior engineer. I occasionally will also work out equity arrangements. You can bring me aboard on an hourly basis, or reserve a certain number of hours a week with a retainer.