Primary market
Fractional CTO for US Startups
Most of the companies I work with are American, and I am based in India. I would rather say that on the page than have you find it out three emails in, because the honest version is more convincing than the alternative: I have been doing distributed engineering leadership across three continents for a decade, and the logistics were solved a long time ago.
What follows is the practical answer to every question a US founder asks before signing: when am I available, how do you pay me, who owns the code, and what happens when your first enterprise customer sends a security questionnaire.
How this actually works
The questions US founders ask before signing
I hold US hours, not convenient-for-me hours
I keep a standing overlap with Eastern and Pacific working hours. That means your standups, your planning, and your incident calls happen at your time, not at a compromise hour that quietly makes everything slower. If your team is in New York, I am in your morning. If it is San Francisco, I am there for your afternoon.
Contracting is the boring part, and it is already solved
US-standard MSA, invoiced in USD, W-8BEN on file so your finance team is not chasing paperwork at year end. IP assignment is explicit and unambiguous: everything I write for you is yours from the moment it is written. I have signed these agreements dozens of times and I am not going to negotiate you into a corner over them.
SOC 2 arrives with your first enterprise deal, not before
American buyers above a certain contract size will audit you, and it always surfaces mid-deal when there is no time. I sequence the controls, logging, and access management early so that when the questionnaire lands it is a form-filling exercise instead of a quarter-long scramble that costs you the deal.
Hiring: US rates, offshore, or the blend that actually works
You can hire US-market engineers, build offshore, or run a blend. All three work and all three fail differently. I have built teams on both sides and I will tell you which one fits your runway and your product, then run the interview loop either way rather than handing you a framework and wishing you luck.
Written by default, so distributed does not mean slow
Architecture decisions get written down. Reviews happen in the open. Context lives in documents, not in someone's head or a call you missed. This is good practice for any team, and it is the specific thing that makes a distributed senior hire work instead of becoming a bottleneck you have to schedule around.
How an engagement runs
Week one, month one, month three
Week 1
I find out what is actually true
Architecture review, codebase read, and honest conversations with every engineer you have. You get a written assessment at the end of it: what is solid, what is risky, what is going to break, and what it costs to fix each one. No slide deck, just a document you can act on.
Month 1
The bleeding stops and the roadmap becomes real
I fix or contain the things from week one that were actually urgent, and rebuild the technical roadmap so it has dates you can believe. If you are hiring, the role is written and the interview loop exists. If you are pre-launch, scope gets cut, usually by a lot.
Month 3
It runs without me in the room
Ship cadence is predictable, the team knows the standard, security and infrastructure are at the level your customers expect, and the decisions are documented. If the engagement is a bridge to a full-time CTO, this is where I start hiring my replacement.
Why me, for this specifically
Experience, not a capabilities deck
Plenty of people can advise on us startups. Fewer have shipped in it, been wrong in it, and had to fix it with their own name on the commit. Here's what I'm bringing.
- Most current clients are US-based, across SaaS, healthtech, and AI
- SYNCHFIT built for US market launch from New York
- Head of Engineering at Cashmycell, a US marketplace
- USD invoicing, US-standard contracts, W-8BEN on file
Pricing
Priced at $100 an hour. Not counted at it.
I value my time at $100 an hour and the retainers are sized from that, but the hours are a floor I commit to rather than a cap I bill against. If a week needs more, it gets more. A full-time CTO in the US runs about $260,000 a year before equity; I'll do that job for $60,000 at 150% commitment. Three-month minimum, then month to month.
It does not all have to be cash. The split is negotiable, from a small equity component up to roughly half and half, depending on your stage and how long we expect to work together.
Technical Advisor
$1,500
per month
Minimum 15+ hours a month
A senior technical brain on call. For founders who mostly need the big decisions checked rather than someone in the codebase.
Fractional CTO
$5,000
per month
Minimum 50+ hours a month
Around 50 hours a month as your acting CTO, usually two days a week. I own technical direction, and the roadmap ships because someone senior is accountable for it.
Embedded CTO
$8,000
per month
Minimum 80+ hours a month
Around 80 hours a month, usually three days a week, hands on the keyboard. Everything above, plus I build the hard parts myself instead of delegating them.
Questions
US startups, specifically
Does the time difference actually work?
Yes, because I structure around it rather than hoping it goes away. I hold your working hours for the overlap that matters and use the offset for deep work, which in practice means you get review comments and progress waiting for you in the morning. If it were not working, I would not have US clients renewing.
Who owns the code you write?
You do, completely and from the first commit. IP assignment is explicit in the agreement. This should never be ambiguous and I have seen founders get badly burned when it was.
Can you join investor and board calls?
Yes, and I am comfortable in them. Part of what you are hiring is someone who can answer a technical diligence question from an investor without it turning into a problem you have to clean up afterwards.
More general questions about cost, commitment, and how this compares to a full-time CTO are answered on the main fractional CTO page.
Earned, Not Claimed
What the founders and teams I build with say
I had the pleasure of working with Kunal while building out my MVP and I have to say that it was pleasure to both interact and work with him and his team. As a first time founder, I had a lot of self doubt and internal ruptures, however Kunal's calm, never-say-die and never-panic attitude often helped bring me back to center. I can't vouch for him enough.
Anand Tahiliani
Founder, Debaser Technologies
I had the pleasure of working closely with Kunal during my time as a Product Manager at DhunGuru. As our CTO, Kunal and his team at Panicle Tech worked closely with me across the entire product journey, from building and launching our mobile apps to developing and maintaining our web platforms. His technical expertise, ownership, and willingness to collaborate made a real difference, and I genuinely enjoyed working with him throughout the journey.
Anirudh Joshi
Product Manager, DhunGuru
Kunal helped us architect Mosler's core platform, connecting smart lock hardware, our cloud dashboard, and PMS integrations into one reliable system. The foundation he helped design in those early days still scales with us today.
Pranav Kapoor
Co-Founder, Mosler
Building in us startups? Let's talk.
Thirty minutes. Tell me what you're building and where it's stuck, and I'll give you a straight answer on whether I can help.
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