My CTO quit. Our GitHub was empty.

Infinia · 2026-10-07

My CTO asked if I had a minute. He'd taken another job and was "happy to help with the transition." After he left, I opened our GitHub and found nothing.

He was the only one who knew how we deployed, how Jira worked, and where the keys were. I didn't know what to panic about first. And everyone I could ask had a reason to tell me it was fine.

Then I remembered bumping into an old friend at a founders' breakfast a few days earlier. Chuck was a former IBM Engineering Leader who had spent years leading complex deployments, and he'd recently started working as a fractional CTO. I sent him a hastily written email: "Chuck, I need your help."

We got on Zoom that afternoon.

"Who do you have on your team?" he asked.

"One data scientist and a junior engineer," I said.

"When do you need this by?" He was reading something off-screen.

"This week." I smiled as I said it. I already knew that wasn't possible.

He looked up. "So what happened?"

"My CTO was shipping deployments, but there was nothing in GitHub when I checked. I've emailed him. No response."

"I worked on something similar a few months ago," Chuck said. "Can you introduce me to your team?"

I pasted their emails into the chat before he finished the sentence.

The next day, Chuck had a plan. It would take three weeks, and my two-person team was ready to pull all-nighters to get it done.

Chuck saved me from having to cancel customer contracts. That alone was worth more than his retainer. And his fees were well below what I'd been paying a full-time CTO to do what turned out to be a part-time job.

When the crisis was over, I asked him to stay on and run our entire product. He did, and he trained our in-house team along the way.

What I learned

I learned the difference between a freelancer and a fractional that week. A freelancer does a task. A fractional owns a function.

Chuck didn't advise me on what to do about our code. He took responsibility for it. He met my team, made the plan, and owned the result. That's what separates a fractional who becomes a trusted partner from one who's just a paid advisor.

What I learned from this experience is the reason Infinia exists today.