The Founder's Tech Brief
Technology, translated into founder decisions. Most tech newsletters are written for engineers — this one is written for the person who has to sign off the budget. What to build, what it should cost, and the traps that quietly burn runway — in plain English, every two weeks.
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- 5-minute read
- No jargon, no hype
- Written by a working Fractional CTO
Every edition, four things.
The shift that matters
One technology shift per edition — AI tooling, build-vs-buy economics, hiring — explained in plain English, with what it changes for your company specifically.
What things actually cost
Real numbers on engineering: day rates, team costs, AI spend, rebuild budgets. The figures agencies and vendors would rather you didn't have going into the meeting.
The traps
The decisions that look fine today and cost six figures in year two — over-engineering, the wrong first hire, platform lock-in, demo-ware AI. Spotted before you sign.
The founder's playbook
Every edition ends with what to actually do — questions to ask your dev team or agency this week, phrased so you don't need a technical background to ask them.
Recent editions
The brief also runs as a visual digest on LinkedIn — follow along there — but email subscribers get every edition first, in full.
The AI coding shift
What AI coding agents actually mean for your engineering team, your velocity, and your burn — beyond the hype cycle.
AI coding tools, ranked for founders
Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot and the rest — compared on the only axis that matters to you: what your team ships per pound spent.
Who writes it — and why it's free.
I'm Mayur Kale, a hands-on Fractional CTO in London. I spend my weeks making these exact calls inside startups and enterprises — the brief is the same judgment, written down. It's free because it's how founders get to know how I think before some of them decide they want that thinking inside their company. No pitch inside the editions; if you ever want more, you know where I am.
Get the next edition.
Five minutes, every two weeks. The technology decisions on your desk, made legible.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.