Boards, CEOs and investors
Helping boards with technology strategy, investment and risk
In short
Boards need to understand technology well enough to govern it: where it creates value, where it creates risk, whether the team is capable of the plan and whether the investment is sound. I advise boards and present to them, and help technology leaders explain their work in commercial terms.
You might recognise this
- Technology is a large share of your spend or risk, and the board lacks a technical voice.
- You are preparing for a funding round, an acquisition or due diligence.
- A security, compliance or AI decision needs board-level judgement.
- Your CTO wants help presenting technology to the board.
How we might work together
Examples, not packages. They often overlap within one relationship, and we shape the work together.
- Advising the board
- Joining board or committee discussions on technology strategy, investment, capability and risk.
- Preparing for a transaction
- An independent view of the technology ahead of a raise, an investment or a sale.
- Supporting your technology leader
- Helping your CTO shape board reporting around commercial outcomes.
Relevant experience
- Served on the BBC’s digital strategy board, one of approximately 12–15 members overseeing digital strategy across the organisation, including enterprise architecture and software engineering standards Read the case study
- Led Remo’s technology organisation through contraction and acquisition by Events.com Read the case study
- Shared responsibility for a £9M annual budget at the BBC, and managed a multi-million-dollar budget at Remo Read the case study
- Regularly presented hydrogen fuel technology to boards of publicly listed companies at Puregeneration
How we start
We start with a focused look at what you’re trying to achieve, what’s getting in the way, and how I could help. From there, we agree whether there’s a useful role for me and what it should involve.
- Understanding the business and what you are trying to achieve
- Meeting the people who matter to the work
- Looking at enough evidence to see where I could be useful
- Deciding together whether an ongoing role makes sense, and what it should be
Selected results
| Organisation | What changed |
|---|---|
| BBCSenior Engineering Manager, 2017 to 2021. News and World Service | Led a 50-person engineering team for an audience of 400 million people, sharing a £9M budget in a leadership trio. Moved a PHP monolith from on-premises servers to AWS with better than 99.99% uptime, and rolled out HTTPS and a Tor mirror for audiences under censorship. |
| RemoCTO, 2021 to 2024. Events and remote-office SaaS | Led a 24/7 engineering organisation spanning GMT−8 to GMT+8 through pandemic hypergrowth, contraction and acquisition by Events.com. Cut infrastructure and vendor spend by more than 80% over 14 months, achieved approximately 99.99% uptime with recovery from live-event failures in under one minute, and achieved SOC 2 and ISO 27001. |
Questions
Is this a board seat?
Not necessarily. Most of this work is advising boards and presenting to them, which is different from a statutory appointment as a director. If you are considering a formal board or non-executive role, we can discuss that directly.
Can you review our technology before a deal?
Yes. I give investors, acquirers or founders an independent view of the technology, its risks and what it would take to address them.