What have I done? Am I crazy?

Today is D-day. As of 5pm UK time, I no longer work in big tech!!

No job. No safety net. No big-company title.

I'm going back to what I'm good at - building my own small SaaS products whilst also helping smaller tech companies build theirs - helping them with vision, ideas, technical strategy and kick ass engineering teams that help them to succeed.

Why did I leave?

For the last 30 years, I've been working in technical leadership and for the last 14 of those, I've been CTO and co-founder for an enterprise SaaS company which we'd successfully scaled through to acquisition in March '25, and which is now soaring onwards to stratospheric heights.

Being acquired by a larger company like this was absolutely the right thing for the business, we needed their backing to reach further and grow faster, to breach new markets and scale way beyond what we'd originally dreamed when we started.

But, the right decision commercially doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be the right decision personally.

During the due diligence and acquisition process, I had a fair idea that I wouldn't be the person to take the company onwards on this next chapter - scaling a company from 3 to 200 people is one thing, being in senior leadership when there's 2000+ is a completely different beast and, as I knew during that process, I'm just not wired to patch into big corporate life.

No matter how hard we might try to keep a larger company feeling small and hold onto that startup spirit, a larger company is always going to move senior leadership into a world of constant meetings, a firehose of constant emails and slack messages, endless HR, training, compliance, talent planning, financial planning, company events and a multitude of other things that I find to be distractions from what I enjoy - moving forward with my team to build a great product.

That's not to say those things aren't important - they absolutely are at a multi £billion company scale, but they're things for someone else. I'm very much the hair on fire hands on CTO guy who specialises in vision, ideas, technical strategy, and building/leading kick ass engineering teams with robust engineering practices and processes in place to get a tech startup launched, grow it to ~100+ employees and on to the eventual acquisition by the £billion company who then take it stratospheric. That's what I love, that's where my skills lie. Beyond is where my appetite ends.

I'm sure going to miss the salary and benefits package though!

What's next?

Well first off, I feel particularly blessed that after 14 years of long hard graft I've been able to exit successfully and hand my role off to someone else to take our hard work to that next level. It's given me the financial security to be able to start FirstCTO and, the company behind it, Brookhaus.

My intent is to form this next step around three pillars.

Pillar 1 - helping other founders

FirstCTO is my "professional practice" - it's where I'll focus most of my time and through this I'll work with early-stage startups as a "fractional CTO".

In either an advisory or hands on capacity I'll help founders shape their company's future by helping them establish clear technical vision, navigate complex early technical decisions, put in place processes and practices to help them scale, and help them build a kick ass engineering team.

Currently as of D-Day, I'm immediately getting involved as fractional CTO (and co-founder) of GrassRoots+ to "Kickstart a revolution for sports coaches and communities".

I've also got a book coming out later in the year - the "Accidental CTO" - aimed at helping technical co-founders know what they don't even know they need to know as they gravitate from engineer to CTO. The book I wish I had as I navigated that path!

Pillar 2 - building useful software

Through the Brookhaus apps portfolio, I'll continue to develop practical tools and SaaS products that solve real-world problems. This could be anything - I aim to seek out where there's an itch or a pain point in every day life that can be solved with an app or SaaS platform, and build those. A few quick examples of apps and services launching out of this to demonstrate:

GrassRoots+
- Coaches, especially in grassroots team sports like football, cricket, and rugby, give up a lot of their personal time, often as volunteers, to plan training sessions, matches and tournaments.
- Aimed at coaches of all levels, across all sports, to make it easier to plan and organise 1:1 and team based coaching activities - from reusable session plans to tracking progress, managing events, competitions, games, and tournaments.
Cinchflow personal finance
- A completely free and open desktop app (Windows, Mac, Linux) that helps households manage their finances and future budget planning.
- Fully open source under the MIT license
- Private by design - no cloud service, no SaaS, no bank API integration, just simple and fast financial recording and planning.
- I built this both as an experiment of AI assisted development and to scratch my own itch - to replace my own spreadsheets - my monthly finanical planning is now done in 5 minutes each month instead of several hours.
Doorstep family app
- Busy families can be chaotic - often as I'm stepping over the doorstep someone will shout over to me to "Don't forget you're taking Isaac to training tonight and please pick up some milk on your way home".
- Doorstep is an app to bring calm to chaos. It's for managing everything around a busy family life - Schedules, events, appointments, reminders, birthdays, chores, rewards, and chat - a central hub to plan family life.

Pillar 3 - a creative outlet

Pillar 3 is all about passion projects for fun rather than commercial endeavours.

Throughout my professional life, and even before, I've always had a passion for building video games. I must have started and abandoned over 100 projects over the years, experimenting with different engines, and even building my own. In the early 90's I remember pouring over decompiled assembly language from the games of the time trying to work out how their back buffer and screen swapping worked and a lot of that made me dig extremely deeply into the engineering behind it, which I think made me a better engineer overall.

But what I like about games development is it's a technical AND a creative medium. From art, sprites, animation, 3d modelling, to sound effects, music, special effects, post processing through to story telling and world building. It scratches all those creative itches for me.

As so, through the brand Dad Makes Games, I have given myself the goal of releasing at least one finished game within the next 12 months. When I'm not busy with Brookhaus, FirstCTO and home/family projects, this is what I'll be doing.

Conclusion

That was longer and more detailed than I'd planned to write, but I wanted to put down all my thoughts for why I've moved on from big tech and set the scene for what I think the future looks like and where my primary endeavor, FirstCTO, fits in.

I hope someone out there finds it useful, and if not, it's a stake in the ground for me to look back on in years to come to see if I achieved what I'd hoped. I'm excited to focus on the things I'm pretty good at and leave behind the things I don't enjoy or find distracting.