Consulting

I’ve worked with seed-to-Series A startups across healthcare, e-commerce, and enterprise SaaS as a Fractional/Interim CTO and Product Engineer since early 2018

I also have significant experience building with AI, having built AI products deployed to Fortune 500 companies and independently grown a significant audience enabling transparency in NYC’s public proceedings using AI.

For inquiries, email consulting@vikramoberoi.com.

• What I do
• How I work with clients
• Case studies
  • Valence: enabling a successful AI pivot
  • Odyssey: helping win an RFP & navigating fintech
  • Sitka: bridging a CTO gap until their Series A
  • Hiring early engineers and CTOs at early-stage startups

What I do

I’m an experienced technical leader who ships and partners closely with founders.

My work is hands-on. I build software, write product and technical specs, make Product and Engineering hires, and actively manage projects & teams.

I give founders leverage they sorely need on Product & Engineering when they:

• Are starting their company.
• Are busy fundraising or going to market.
• Have gaps in technical leadership.
• Need a reliable technical leader to take on a major product initiative.

How I work with clients

When I work with companies, I either commit intensely with one at a time or carve out short-term/part-time valuable roles to play for a few.

Full-time roles include being an Interim CTO or an Engineering Lead on a major initiative.

Short-term and part-time roles have included:

• Navigating thorny technical/build-vs-buy decisions
• Interviewing engineers and mentoring/coaching new leaders
• Wearing the CTO hat fractionally (10-20 hours a week)

Case studies

Valence: enabling a successful AI pivot

Valence (backed by Insight Partners) is a long-time client that sells HR software to Fortune 500 companies. In 2023 Parker Mitchell (Founder/CEO) wanted to pivot Valence into scalable AI professional coaching.

A partner and I built the first version, making sure:

• We had something we could deploy to customers in ~3 months.
• The product could begin security reviews
• Parker could sell well ahead of the product.

I built a lot of software, wrote product & tech specs, hired/managed engineers, and made sure Valence could begin long Fortune 500 sales cycles early.

~6 months after we began work, the first contract was inked. Today the product is Valence’s primary offering.

Valence has been a client since 2018. I’ve helped them hire, worked with them fractionally, and been full-time at various points of their journey since near the company’s inception.

Odyssey: helping win an RFP & navigating fintech

Odyssey (backed by a16z, Tusk Ventures) is the primary vendor/custodian of state education savings account (ESA) dollars for multiple US states.

I worked with Joe Connor (Founder/CEO) to manage two urgent priorities/risks in 2022:

1. His first demo to win a state RFP was weeks away and the dev shop he was working with was likely to miss the deadline.

2. Before going live, Odyssey needed to figure out how to reliably steward tens of millions of state dollars, maintain an accurate ledger, manage transactions with online/offline vendors, and ensure funds were used properly.

Joe needed a demo for Iowa’s RFP process, fast. I didn’t have capacity, so I helped him bring on a product-focused dev shop that knew how to make reasonable trade-offs and scope what was necessary for a persuasive demo.

Later, in the 4-8 weeks before going live after winning Iowa’s RFP, all of Odyssey’s technical risk was pooled in how, exactly, the company would enable ESA enrollees to access and spend tens of millions of dollars subject to all the rules Odyssey had to adhere to.

I worked quickly to de-risk and bring clarity here:

• Writing specs detailing what Odyssey needed to go live + researching solutions.
• Navigating vendors that handled needs from debit card issuance to ledger functionality.
• Describing the fintech vendor landscape as I saw it to Joe and the team.
• Rooting out assumptions we needed to validate.
• Figuring out how to sequence work to manage uncertainty and risk on a short timeline.

Since then, I’ve also worked with Odyssey to hire engineers and even referred their Head of Operations their way.

Sitka: bridging a CTO gap until their Series A

Sitka (backed by Venrock, First Round Capital, now merged with AristaMD) was a specialist e-consult platform.

When it’d otherwise take weeks to get an appointment with a medical specialist, Sitka allowed primary care doctors to send patient data securely to its specialist network. Their specialists would turn around consults in under 24 hours by recording a video for the PCP and patient.

In March 2020, Sitka’s CTO stepped down and Kelsey Mellard (Founder/CEO) needed help filling that gap.

I served as interim CTO at Sitka for the year, during which I helped Sitka:

• Lead and double the size of the existing team (of 4 engineers to 8)
• Clear SOC 2 certification.
• Go live with a major national healthcare provider.
• Run the day-to-day until we hired a replacement and the company raised a Series A.

Hiring early engineers and CTOs at early-stage startups

Since 2018 I’ve interviewed hundreds of candidates and helped founders:

• Figure out what skills they need to hire for.
• Where to source candidates given their time and budget.
• Design, set up, and run interview processes with high-signal technical & behavioral screens and rapid turnaround.

As of April 2025, I’ve helped:

• Paul Yacoubian @ Copy.ai (backed by Wing VC) hire early engineers and their CTO, Charlie Morss, who has seen the company through over 3 years of growth.
• Nick Reber @ Garner Health (backed by Founders Fund, Redpoint Ventures) hire their Head of Engineering, Daniel Moore, who was their 4th employee and scaled the team to 40 FTEs over 4 1/2 years.
• Nicole Bocskocsky @ Elaborate (backed by Tusk Ventures) hire early engineers as they built out services to helpfully and scalably interpret lab results.
• Whitnie Narcisse @ First Round Capital hire engineers who build and maintain the software that powers First Round Network, a platform used by the community of companies they back.
• Michael Kaminsky @ Recast (backed by Lerer Hippeau) hire an engineer to build portals to serve summary results of MMM models they built for customers.
• Julia Huang @ Haldi (backed by Blue Collective) hire early engineers to help scale the skincare personalization process they’d run manually to-date.