The Venturepreneur

PRODUCT-DRIVEN

FRACTIONAL CTO

WHAT IS A FRACTIONAL CTO?

A fractional Chief Technology Officer (fCTO) is a veteran technology executive
who serves on the leadership team of a company on a less-than-full-time basis.

Engaging an fCTO can be an elegant decision for companies who want
quality expertise without the cost and risk.

Download Your Free Guide to Fractional CTOs Now

Book a free consultation

What’s a Venturepreneur?

A Venturepreneur is someone creating not just a business but a healthy, thriving, sustainable organization.

Venturepreneurs recognize that imagining a new thing is not the end of the game … it takes people, a business model, strategy, operations … and all the other stuff that makes that thing operationally and fiscally sustainable.

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MICHAEL SATTLER

FRACTIONAL CTO | THE VENTUREPRENEUR

With a career spent in founding and technical leadership roles with new and enterprise-level organizations, Michael Sattler is a veteran in technology strategy, operations, and product management.

B2B and B2C SaaS product development
Software and application design and engineering operations
New venture creation
Scaled and managed technical teams from 2-50+ across three continents
Large-scale cross-functional program management
Innovation practices

BA, Princeton University

MBA (magna cum laude)
Babson Collage

#1 in Entrepreneurship for 30 years

“Michael has a knack for being able to see beyond the immediate, and even longer term, to a true vision of what a team, technology and company can become. … He truly is a force to be reckoned with. Some days felt like I just needed to hold on to his coattails to keep up.”
Sean Bullock, Director, Data Strategy at Activate Care

Part of the ExperienceHack Collective

ExperienceHack is a team of entrepreneurs and fractional leaders with our own share of setbacks, hurdles and oh shit moments. We’ve translated that experience into helping countless startup founders

So they don’t feel alone.
So that hurdles are visible.
So that they can move forward with more confidence.

A VENTUREPRENEUR IS LIKE AN ENTREPRENEUR

BUT DIFFERENT.

A Venturepreneur is someone creating not just a business but a healthy, thriving, sustainable organization.

It doesn’t matter whether your venture is big or small, old or new:
product and technology have to be managed seamlessly,
along with strategy, customers, and stakeholders from other disciplines.

Everything affects everything. And people are at the center of it all.

Recent Engagements

VulcanKore

VulcanKore offers a revolutionary series of innovative clean energy products, including Transportable Thermal Batteries, Direct Solar Charging, and forthcoming climate-friendly energy generation solutions for commercial operations.

Portalys

Portalys is blockchain-enabled event ticketing and management tool that makes it easier, more intuitive, and secure for organizers and artists to create personalized live event experiences.

Volt Intelligence

Volt Intelligence offers a revolutionary AI-powered assistant for baseball organizations. It’s a tireless strategist and analyst of player performance, opponent tendencies, and tactics.

Authentify.art

With solutions for collectors, galleries, and logistics professionals, Authentify Art brings trust to the fine art ecosystem by securely connecting physical artwork to its digital provenance.

Adesso Health

With complete treatment offerings for corporate wellness, value-based medical providers, and insurers, Adesso”s platform-based solution helps discover and treat cardiac risk for women.

Candoor

Candoor’s SaaS-based solution helps underserved college students and industry professionals book 1-on-1 conversations and form the basis of networks that last a lifetime.

Projects in Development

A selection of product concepts currently being refined and validated.

BigIdea Retreats

Mission-driven, boutique work meetings for hybrid and remote teams. Big Idea offers a venue, catering, and an inspirational speaker all wrapped up in a convenient package for your remote team’s in-person gatherings.

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Corartis

Compiled from the most reliable public and private sources and refined by a AI model trained on probability and accuracy, Corartis provides reports and data for those who value the unique information that contributes to the value
of fine art.

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Hathaway

A cloud-based generative AI that sits atop
corporate CRM, email, social media, and public data services,
delivering actionable connections, topics, and conversation points to help
enrich and develop
your professional
network.

COMING SOON

Unbox

Email hasn’t changed
since 1971, and it
doesn’t work well.
Unbox throws out the tired, fifty-year-old idea of a time-based inbox and replaces it with a message center that actually works the way our minds do, augmented by AI that learns the way you think.

COMING SOON

“A good fractional CTO adds value on Day One.”

Services and Capabilities

Strategic planning that blends technology and busienss
Comprehensive engineering operations management
Software / application design and implementation
Modular and web service architecture design and implementation
Data architecture design, reporting, and analysis
Third party IT service and data integration
In-house and offshore software development team management
DevOps, systems administration, security, and compliance
Technical talent recruitment and management
Operational process flow documentation and optimization
B2B and B2C SaaS product development
Strategy-to-roadmap product design
Product wireframing, fully-interactive UX mockups, detailed requirement and user story definition, QA and testing plans
Large-scale cross-functional program management

What You Get

An outsider’s perspective and a wealth of diverse experiences
Fresh insights, innovative solutions, and best practices from different sectors
Flexible, scalable leadership to accommodate evolving needs
Digital transformation direction, software development oversight, and cybersecurity insights
Past experience with and openness to a variety of technologies
Communication skills and the availability to articulate technical strategies and decisions verbally, in print, and in pictures with individuals at all levels of technical understanding
Direct management experience with teams, individual contributors, and outsourced resources
Direct leadership experience that recognizes the importance of collaboration across disciplines
Direct experience working for organizations of your size and stage of maturity
Immediate integration with your leadership and technology teams
Fast uptake on your industry, business, platforms, and people

Book a free consultation

Finding business-minded, product-driven technical leadership
has always been a challenge. Now there’s a new way to move your business forward

And you can start today.

Download Your Free Guide to Fractional CTOs Now

Book a free consultation

Want a preview?

The Venturepreneur Video Series

A unique perspective on technology and business

Episode 1. What is a Venturepreneur?April 18, 2023
A Venturepreneur is anyone who’s building an organization to make a new idea real. That’s what this series is going to be about: combining the latest product thinking with the best practices of the most nimble startups to help create ventures cheaper, better, and faster than ever before.
Episode 2. Venturepreneurs vs entrepreneursApril 24, 2023
The difference between entrepreneurship and venturepreneurship? Ego. A venturepreneur understands that to create a fiscally sustainable result, you’ve got to create something that balances the contributions and needs of groups of people.
Episode 3. What do venture structures look like?April 28, 2023
Traditional org charts contain some implicit biases – and not good ones. We provide an alternative.
Episode 4. What is the purpose of a venture?May 1, 2023
What is the primary purpose of a new venture? It’s simple: find product-market-fit. That’s it.
Episode 5. What is product-market fit?May 17, 2023
Put gliby, product-market fit is “finding a good market with a product capable of satisfying that market.” But it gets harder from there. One useful definition is “when strangers are calling you about your product without being asked”.
Episode 6. How NOT to find product-market fitJune 16, 2023
How NOT to find product-market fit: A) Worry about a business plan. B) Raise money to build a product. C) Build your product before you know how to sell it.
Episode 7. Product-Market Fit: The Market is an OceanJanuary 30, 2024
In this video I start to explore the details of what PMF is, how to think about it, and how to go about making its pursuit central to your new venture’s activity. This is part one with more to come!
Episode 8. Product-Market Fit: Sniff-Test-Proof PMFJanuary 30, 2024
The second part of a PMF overview : what it is and how to think about it. This one focuses on what evidence you’re looking for in a PMF strategy and how it can make a huge difference in getting raising money for your venture.

Hot Takes and Insights from TheVenturepreneur

VIEW ALL

Leadership Circles and Generative ConflictSeptember 16, 2024
Entrepreneurship is a team sport. That means that one of the most important responsibilities of a founder is to attract people to the venture and get them aligned and working
Eight Important Principles of Startup Software EngineeringJune 19, 2024
The software engineering that makes a startup successful is not the kind you learned in school. Too many first-time early stage technical leaders make the mistake of building for the
Micro Arcologies?April 22, 2024
We have a housing problem, often because homeowners oppose the construction of new housing in established communities. We also have a lifestyle #sustainability problem: our cities sprawl inefficiently, with an impact on climate. We’re also seeing a surge in interest in tiny homes, remote working, and walkable urban centers. What if we combined all this, and updated Paolo Soleri’s arcologies for the 21st century?
Why Agile Estimates Suck – And What To Do About ItFebruary 19, 2024
Engineering is always in the crosshairs. No matter how much pressure you bring to bear, only so much is going to make it through. And the whole process sucks. Here’s what to do about it.
Most of What I Know About Entrepreneurship I Learned from Phineas and FerbFebruary 19, 2024
Phineas and Ferb are builders. Makers, really. They dream up and create wonderful, imaginative, fantastic stuff – not to compete or profit, but because it’s worth doing.
My Top 5 Startup MoviesJanuary 8, 2024
As a lifetime “movie guy” and long time startup activist, I love a good startup movie. Here are my top picks – and the ones I’m NOT fond of.