Most founders know what they want to build. Very few know how to build it, who to hire, or what it should actually cost.
That's what I get hired to figure out.
What I've built
I was employee #4 at StockX. I designed the core architecture — the bid/ask matching engine, the pricing data model, the infrastructure — and we went from whiteboard to launched marketplace in eight months. It's now valued at over $3.7 billion.
Before that I spent fifteen years building data-intensive systems for IBM, Ford, Volkswagen, Mazda, and France Telecom — where "the report is slow" meant ten million rows and a $250M decision waiting on the answer.
I still build. I co-founded UpTo in 2011 — a consumer calendar platform that reached 750,000 registered users across 50 countries, raised $5M from Detroit Venture Partners, Ludlow Ventures, and Venture Investors, and got covered by the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, TechCrunch, NBC Nightly News, CNN, and CNBC. A decade later I bought the company back from its original investors and rebuilt it as an embeddable calendar for developers and agencies.
What I do now
I work as a fractional CTO and technical advisor. Companies bring me in when the stakes are high and the right answer isn't obvious:
- You've raised a seed round and need a real engineering team — not twelve months of learning what a bad senior hire costs.
- Your architecture worked at 100 users and is coming apart at 1,000.
- You're buying or being bought, and you need someone who will read the codebase and tell you the truth.
- You have a technical leader on the org chart and nobody with scale experience to pressure-test them.
The through-line: these are the decisions that are expensive to reverse.
How I work
Most engagements are ten days a month on a twelve-to-eighteen month term. I also do shorter architecture and scaling reviews, technical due diligence for acquisitions and investments, and engineering organization assessments.
I'm in Detroit and work with teams anywhere.
Alongside the advisory work, I've spent seven years as Mentor in Residence at TechTown Detroit, where I've advised over 500 early-stage companies across health tech, travel, sustainability, fashion, and consumer apps. I also chaired the board of RainCatchers, a disaster-relief nonprofit, for five years.
If you're weighing a technical decision you can't afford to get wrong, reach me at hello@davesacre.com.
First conversation is free — and I'll tell you if I'm not the right person for it.