It’s Issue number THREE, folks!

The topic of the issue?

Fractional Hires.

A quick and dirty definition here is “a highly skilled professional or executive (e.g., CFO, CMO, CTO) who works for a company on a part-time, contract, or project basis, typically for only a few hours a week or month. They provide strategic, high-level expertise without the cost or commitment of a full-time, permanent salary”

Source

Now this was going to be topic next week, but then Christie Kaplan - who, if you’re not connected with her, you should be - made this post.

I scrapped my whole issue, and started from scratch on the spot.

There’s good content, and there’s great content. Something you read and move on from, and the other stuff. The stuff you stop in your tracks and just take in on a whole different level.

Not only am I a Fractional CCO (Chief Customer Officer) myself, but I’m in the startup space talking to newborn startups and founders all day, every day - and every single one of them, every one, hits a wall where they need real expertise to move forward. The ones who get past that wall hit another, different wall.

And another.

And another.

In every case, a seasoned strategic leader and/or highly specialized skill set, or expertise would get them over that wall, and avoid some, or at least prepare for later ones. But startups in early-stage discovery/survival mode (or actively raising rounds) can’t afford a full C-suite, customer team, support team.

Early-stage startups drown in doing everything, all at once, and doing it all FAST.

The vast majority of startups and concepts fail here, never making it past that first wall, a small handful barely scrape by to later walls, before running out of steam.

And that sucks.

Fractional hiring is a way to get exceptional people, fully in-house, with the skills and experience you need, hitting the ground running immediately. No ramp, no deep vetting, no training period - people who can lift you up and run you across that finish line. People who normally would cost way more than an early-stage or pre-seed startup could ever consider, but at a pay scale and time investment balance that works for everyone.

As Christie herself said in a follow-up comment: “It’s a hands on execution leading with strategic leadership. Basically roll up your sleeves doers with seasoned experience (in) that startup stage and industry”

It’s not just one post though, no matter how good. Why Christie is the focus of this issue is she’s building a whole network of fractional design leads, and doing a ton of marketing and outreach to get startup founders and fractional designers connected to each other.

THAT part stands out because even though everyone in the startup space knows this is a problem, and a big one, it’s extremely rare to find any kind of active support for startups looking to solve the issue and get past these walls.

Startup incubators do, but that’s a significant amount of time, usually a geographic limitation, and limited seats. Large investors, VCs, even most startup coaches will spend all day waving people off - and losing some of the best founders and business ideas on the market because of it.

Even on Christie’s post, one of the earliest comments was someone pushing that startups need “proof.”

Sure!

…and one of the best ways to get “proof” is by bringing someone in who knows what will work as “proof,” and how to get it, package it, and/or sell it. Any of the pieces of that flow that an aspiring founder may struggle to do on their own.

I asked another fellow fractional leader, Jay McCauley, for his best pitch for fractional hires, and he said:

“Fractional roles let startups get senior-level execution exactly when they need it, without the cost or commitment of a full-time hire.”

Honestly, I think he said it better in an earlier post:

*Sidebar shout-out to Taylor Crane and his newsletter/job board as well. He’s recruiting for a Fractional CFO, if you know anyone!

Startups usually fail. That is the majority. It’s more common, a lot more common, to fail than it is to succeed. Most estimates put the failure rate at something like 80 to 90%

That source, hilariously, puts past-founders in the 18% success rate bucket, and even serial founders (who have succeeded multiple times before) at a paltry 30% success rate.

The biggest gap is early-stage. Concept, friends and family round, MVP, early adopters. Those stages where companies are as much idea as execution, and where they need the most support/resources, but there are the least available.

Now, there’s a lot to unpack there. Frankly, we’ve all seen some bad startup concepts, business concepts, and a big chunk of this could be pivots, people seeing what sticks - etc. Even with that, it’s a very challenging area to succeed in, because the whole concept requires rapid growth and succeeding quickly.

But a lesser talked about through-line is that of those 90% failures, most of them fail for the same reasons:

Ok!

So let’s bring this all together. The key point connecting all of this is that the startups that fail are mostly

Learning the same lessons, just separately.

Even Forbes has a spotlight on the rise of fractional hiring, from just this week!

Startup News Spotlight

…really?

Yes.

Obviously it’s memorable, it’s catchy, it’s a trend, and it’s “dead simple.” The app prompts users to hit a button every day, and if they don’t for consecutive days, automatically reaches out to emergency contacts urging them to check on the user.

It meets an actual need, if a grim one, but it’s gaining traction especially among younger users who find themselves in a pretty dark world. This is the Tamagotchi of 2025 - a unifying presence for young app users, in a shared experience. Something universal, because it’s so easy for anyone to pick up, that friend groups spread it quickly.

There’s a whole lot more to be said here, about why THIS is growing so fast compared to far more complex tools (that’s actually a big core difference right away) but we’ll leave it at that for now!

Rumbles around the World

Amazon web servers (AWS) is just opened up an - in theory - isolated EU web server network, to help with growing concerns about data security housing all EU tech data in the US.

Also, shout-out to both Neuraspace and Connect Robotics (both founded in Portugal, in Porto’s university-led innovation space) for both making it in to NATO’s DIANA “Innovation Core”!

At the opening, I called out general practices by investors, VC’s, even Angel Investors, that more or less amount to “Beat it, kid.”

Come back when you (don’t need us anymore).

Talk to me when you (already have revenue and a team you can succeed with).

That’s honestly the biggest, gaping, glaring hole in business and startup growth, globally. It’s that the people with the resources to small-scale fund startups and build this stuff… don’t actually want to. They’re very rarely mission- or ecosystem-based, they’re looking for the easiest path to highest profits.

There’s nothing inherently wrong about that, it’s a business practice to follow, and it’s mostly worked for a long time.

But there is SO MUCH business being left off the table. And culturally, in the US, and in Silicon Valley in particular, major investors have more resources than ever, but are doubling-down on the highest of high-end investments.

That will never actually find, or create, the next Google (unless it’s OpenAI, but I have plenty of thoughts on that).

What will define business success in the future, and I’m banking on the new future, is a collaborative approach to building startup businesses. Ecosystems, not cage matches. Shared expertise, not silos.

The Europe is in this high-pressure moment, right now, to build the replacements for Big Tech in-house, and is actually pushing for innovation at home, where before as a bloc, Europe would have been perfectly happy to sit back and let the US continue to provide the backbone of tech.

But that’s just pressure.

What makes now the moment, is that those pressures go back almost a decade now, back to 2008, or further. And Europe has been building the startup/innovator community ever since. Gaining experience, gaining speed.

Next time you take a rideshare home from Manhattan to Hell’s Kitchen, you might not take an Uber.

You just might take a Bolt.

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See you next week ;)