June 12, 2024

Brian Childress: The Fractional CEO

37 minutes

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Brian Childress, a seasoned technology executive & fractional CTO with over 15 years of experience helping businesses in healthcare, finance, education & more develop and scale their technology solutions.

In this episode, we dive into Brian's journey to becoming a fractional CTO, the most common technology challenges businesses face, his advice for non-technical founders, and his predictions for the game-changing technologies of the future. We'll also explore topics such as mitigating the risks of outsourcing development work, best practices for application security & scalability, strategies for closing the tech talent gap through global hiring, & the importance of collecting the right data to leverage AI effectively.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Fractionality is a trend in which you seek access to high-level expertise even though you may not have the work or capital to employ them full-time. If we’re honest with ourselves, there’s not 40 hours' worth of work to do in a lot of organisations or in a number of roles, so if I can come in & make high impact in an organisation for a fraction of the cost, that’s really valuable.

One of the biggest things that’s helped me is that day-to-day I do software engineering work, but through most of my career I’ve been freelancing & moonlighting on the side, so I’ve doubled the amount of exposure & experience I’ve been able to gain in my career by working with a number of different organisations, teams, projects & technologies. I’m drawing on every single one of those experiences to help & support the teams I work with.

One of the biggest challenges I see for non-technical founders is determining which advice to follow. Technology can be a black box that’s really hard to understand, & for non-technical founders, there are a lot of people who look & sound like they understand technology, but unfortunately, they could be giving bad advice.

We make things too complex too early. Many of us think we have the next great idea & it’s going to be huge right out of the gate, so we need to build so we can support millions of customers from day 1. That’s never the case. But a lot of the guidance that’s out there comes from the Googles and the Netflixes of the world, and we build our architecture around these organisations. But we forget that they have thousands of people supporting those architectures & their complexity, & millions of users to support.

BEST MOMENTS

‘It’s a fraction of the cost, not the expertise.’

‘Don’t follow the advice of the first person to come to you, it puts a lot of founders and companies in bad positions.’

‘Building in complexity from the outset hurts us all the way through the growth of our business.’

‘What is the simplest set of technologies & solutions that we can put together that solves a real business need? A lot of those boring technologies can be scaled up to support millions of users & billions of requests, we just have to be smart about the way we do it.’

ABOUT THE GUEST

Brian Childress is a seasoned technology executive & fractional CTO with over 15 years of experience helping businesses in healthcare, finance, education, and more develop and scale their technology solutions.

As a technical advisor with a strong background in software engineering, cloud computing, & cybersecurity, Brian is experienced in helping CTOs & CEOs make the right technical decisions for their organisations.

Summit Labs

ABOUT THE HOST

Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.

If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.

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