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Krishan Patel
Consulting for start-ups and fast-moving tech teams

I've built technology used by many of the best hedge funds, financial institutions, and data providers as well as consumer apps used by hundreds of thousands.

To achieve this, I solved many problems growing my technology team to 20+ engineers, and our company to 45+ domain experts, data scientists, data analysts and designers.

I’d like to help you do the same.

A bit about me

I studied Computing at Imperial College London and have been involved in startups ever since. I've been through a great London accelerator (Bethnal Green Ventures) and a number of other startup programs, including Google Startup Accelerator Week (the closest remaining thing is their accelerator), Pioneer, Y-Combinator's Start-Up School, and Mozilla's Open Lab.

Most recently, I was CTO and Co-Founder of Arkera, where we built AI-driven technology for the financial sector. We had 20 of the biggest hedge funds, banks and data providers as our clients. We raised over £9m and built a great team of close to 50 people with up to 20 engineers reporting to me. Arkera was acquired in September 2020.

Before I move on to starting my next company I want to help a wider range of companies overcome their technical and product challenges.

You can read more about me and my work on LinkedIn or my personal page.

What I'll solve for you

  • Define a strong technical vision for your company and products.
  • Strategic planning for technical decisions with a focus on delivery.
  • Hiring great engineers and creating an engineering culture that solves its own problems as it grows.
  • Technical architecture of distributed, cloud based, scalable solutions.
  • Designing and developing micro-service architectures, including breaking down monoliths.
  • Planning and preparation for technical due-diligence processes.
  • Designing processes for teams including running effective, tech and product focussed sprint plannings, retrospectives, stand-ups etc.
  • Designing and running team-specific technical sessions (ask me how we fixed over 95% of our long-term bugs in a matter of weeks).
  • Define and enforce strong engineering practices such as code-reviews, testing and documented design.

...and more. If there's something on your mind you want help with, there's a good chance I went through it and designed a solution for it.

Working Together

For contact hours, or time allocated to me doing work directly for you, I charge by hour / half day.
Apart from this, I join the slack channels of all my clients. This means I can be contacted and am available to help out when needed, without being too fussy about counting time. This is how my value can be best unlocked for your team and company.

If you are interested but my prices or methods doesn't exactly work for you, just reach out - I'll try find something that does.

DiscoveryFree
I'll set up a call to go over what your biggest challenges are and how I could help. The more you put into this the more you'll get.
    Let's start
    Hourly£250
    Best for repeated meetings (e.g. every week), to discuss on-going activities (e.g. hiring) or participate in strategy sessions.
      I'm interested
      Day£2000
      I'm yours for a good four hours. We can really get into problems and work on solutions. This would also work for kick-off meetings or longer planning sessions.
        I'm interested

        Questions

        Our product is great but code / tech stack needs to be updated. Can you help with this?
        This is my favourite thing to work on. I love situations where a product is working and has happy customers but the tech is lacking. At Arkera, we built a world class engineering function with strong engineering principles from the ground up. I'd be right at home helping re-design, re-build or just sprucing up a tech-stack / codebase.
        My company is pre-seed, what can you do for us?
        I've worked with quite a few smaller companies over the last few years. I understand the normal charges don't really suit bootstrapping founders so I work on a more ad-hoc basis with these founders. We can always make things more formal when as you grow!
        Are you open to being a technical advisor?
        Sure, I've worked with quite a few early stage companies now to help them build their technical strategy and hiring plans. Just reach out and we can go over what works for you.
        Will you build stuff for me?
        I love to code! But, over my time at Arkera I became far better at making other engineers more productive. So whilst I would be happy to code for you if you really want, it would be far more efficient for me to work with your engineers and figure out how to increase the teams productivity as a whole. That said, I can put together a team and build out a product for you if that's what you want.
        Do you work with off-shore teams or agencies?
        I've worked with off-shore, near-shore, extension and agency teams. Whilst I really believe the key to a building a great technical product is having an in-house team that believes in iterating it, I understand this isn't for anyone. However, the challenges (mostly translating business ideas into code-able ideas) with these kinds of teams are often much greater so we would probably need more time!

        Interested?

        Email me to get started
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