Michael Raybman

What's your name? Where are you building? Michael Raybman. I'm a CTO. I help early stage technology companies build products and engineering teams. Particularly helping companies restructure and rebuild when things didn't go to plan. And helping a lot of non-technical founders build their first engineering team. So you're doing a fractional CTO. Why aren't you a founder? Why do you want to build something for yourself? Because I used to work for a venture fund where I did that for a lot of companies. I love that. And I think I'm just really good in these situations where things break. And that's where I do my best work. Tell me a little bit more because I know nothing about tech. What's something that broke and you were the right person to take it? I've seen all sorts of situations. I've seen people try to threaten the company, put the key in a bank vault and not release the code base. And we have to rebuild it super fast. I've also just seen a lot of brilliant lawyers and doctors and professionals who are really good at this. Have great ideas, but they've never built an engineering team before. And I help them do that the right way. And for all the non-technical founders out there, right now it's so easy building products. What's your advice for non-technical founders that they want to build really hard stuff? Build something fast. Whatever it takes. Lovable, bold, flawed. Just build something. Show it to people. Get feedback. And put it out there. And that's your first step always. And what's your favorite project you've worked on? I love a company called BriefCatch. They're building legal tech AI. Super differential. They're a very well-initiated, amazing product. 99.9 % retention rate among their customers. Kind of esoteric, but incredible team and incredible product. And how do you actually meet your potential customers? Do you come to an event or do you just go outbound? Usually investors introduce me. They're investors, typically. So when somebody's going to work with you, you have a large network of investors. How were you able to make a lot of friends with investors? I just like to be out in the world and share what I do. If it turns out too hard, I like to share my skills. I also teach people to use AI a lot for free. So check out some of my free seminars on LinkedIn. And I'm always, always, always happy to just spend an hour with a founder. That's never a business relationship. It's just something I love doing. And what's the type of founder that you really, really want to work with? Anyone who needs help building products and technology the right way. And what's your favorite tech stack? Right now, just Node. And Python on quad. Python for data. Node for web. I like simple stuff. I don't try to use too much cool stuff. I just like to build fast. All right. And what's the hardest thing that you built for a founder? I think I'm building one right now. It'll be, it's still in stealth. But it's building architectural designs and drawings for really, really large construction sites. Pretty tough problem. Something that AI doesn't handle well out of the box. I'm excited to share that with the world later. So we've been talking for three minutes. You've been in here for three minutes. What? I got to get out of here. You got to get out. How many? You're out now.