Founder Advisory
Helping founders make better technical and product decisions before they become expensive.
- Architecture & platform choices
- Engineering hiring & team design
- AI roadmap & realistic value
- Scaling decisions, made before they're forced
Independent technology advisory
Technology judgement for high-stakes decisions.
I help founders, investors, and executive teams see technology risk clearly — before it becomes an expensive mistake. Twenty-five years of architecture, engineering leadership, and AI experience, brought to the decision in front of you.
Independent, not a consultancy
Architecture, AI & engineering leadership
For founders, investors & CTOs
How I help
Judgement for decisions that are expensive to get wrong.
I work with founders, investors, and technology leaders at the point where a decision still fits on one page — before it becomes a programme, a hire, or a board paper.
Venture Capital Advisory
An independent technical opinion for investment teams — before the term sheet, and after it.
- Technical due diligence
- CTO & engineering assessment
- AI opportunity assessment
- Post-investment technical advisory
Fractional Chief Architect
Architectural judgement for startups that need a Chief Architect's thinking, without the full-time hire — yet.
- Architecture direction & decision records
- Technical risk & scalability
- Mentoring engineering leads
CTO Coaching
A confidential sounding board for new and experienced CTOs working through decisions they can't easily raise inside the company.
- Difficult architecture calls
- Team & organisational design
- Board & investor communication
Independent Technology Reviews
A grounded, evidence-based view of where a system, a team, or a strategy actually stands.
- Build vs buy
- AI readiness
- Engineering & delivery capability
- Architecture maturity & scalability
How I work
Understand. Question. Decide.
Judgement only earns trust when it's grounded in evidence and delivered without ego. This is how I get there.
Understand what's really being decided
Separate the presenting question from the real one, and surface the constraints, incentives, and assumptions no one has said out loud.
Look at the evidence, not the narrative
Read the architecture, meet the team, and test the roadmap against what the system actually does — not what the slide deck says it does.
Give a straight, evidenced view
A clear opinion, not a menu of options with no owner. Where I'm uncertain, I say so — and why.
Leave you better equipped to decide
Hand over the reasoning behind the recommendation, not just the recommendation, so you can make the next ten decisions without me.
Track record
Twenty-five years in the room where the hard decisions get made.
Not client logos. Just the honest shape of the experience behind the judgement.
25+
Years in software architecture & technology leadership
Independent
No delivery teams, no bench to fill, no programme to sell
Founders → boards
Advisory conversations from early-stage startups to their investors
Speaking & writing
On architecture, AI strategy & technical leadership — see Speaking
Thinking
Ideas for founders, investors, and CTOs navigating high-stakes technology decisions.
Featured idea
Fire-seeking: the hidden skill of technical leadership
The best technical leaders — and the best CTOs — don't just react to problems. They seek out weak signals and inconvenient truths before the board finds them first.
Read article →Scaling & legacy
Three fracture planes for safer legacy migration
A framework for founders and CTOs deciding how much of the platform to rebuild — and how much to leave alone until it actually matters.
Read article →AI strategy
AI adoption is an organisational design problem
Models matter less than most board decks suggest. Workflow design, accountability, and quality control decide whether AI creates value or just noise.
Read article →What people say
Trusted before the decision, not just after it.
“Dave asked the one question none of our other advisors had — and it changed our architecture roadmap before we'd spent a cent building the wrong thing.”
“As an investor, I don't want reassurance about technical risk. I want the truth. That's what we got.”
“He gave me the confidence to make a call on our platform I'd been avoiding for six months.”
About
Curious enough to keep learning. Experienced enough to say what I actually think.
I'm Dave Sammut. For twenty-five years I've been the person brought in when a system, a team, or a decision needs to be understood properly before anyone commits real money to it.
I'm drawn to the moment before a decision is made — where a founder is choosing an architecture, an investor is trying to understand technical risk, or a CTO is working out whether the plan will actually survive contact with scale. My job is to make that moment clearer, not longer.
I still write code, still read architecture diagrams line by line, and still ask the obvious question everyone else has stopped asking. That's less about credentials and more about staying honest with the work.
Start a conversation
Bring me the decision you don't want to get wrong.
Advisory conversations, technical due diligence, architecture reviews, and fractional chief architect engagements — for founders, investors, and executive teams.