I'm Anthony Michel, a hands-on fractional CTO. I carry those decisions with you, so you can run the business. Hong Kong, working worldwide.
20 years shipping software Developer, VP of Engineering, co-founder, CTO Teams led across Hong Kong, India, ASEAN and Europe
Whether you already pay a team or have not hired one yet, the job is the same: make the technology pay.
Your engineers ship slowly and unevenly. They adopted AI and nothing changed: only 23% of companies see a measurable financial return from it (Deloitte and HKU, 2026). I move the team you already pay into AI-native workflows with guardrails, fix how you ship, and make the numbers move. I've done it once already, with a six-engineer production team.
How I move a team into that 23%You have the idea and the budget, not the product or the technical leadership. I build the first version myself and make the technology calls a technical co-founder would, so you reach a real product without betting the runway on an agency. The last product I built this way reached 20,000 users.
How I build a first productProduction systems, numbers attached.
28one · quality-control SaaS for enterprise brands · fractional CTO since 2025
Twelve siloed client databases merged into one shared platform, with a full backend rebuild and a modernized inspection app. Then the deeper change: their six engineers in India now work AI-native, with agent tooling, review gates, and a training program I wrote for them. AI ships in the product too: supply-chain disruption intelligence, automated sizechart extraction, and rebuilt reporting.
FanForce · pre-seed social rewards startup · hands-on product & technology lead since 2024
Product vision, architecture, and much of the code across three major product iterations. The core is an AI evaluation pipeline that scored roughly one million tweets and ten million replies across 2.5 million accounts for quality and community loyalty, feeding a multichain reward distribution system.
Earlier: Zegal (legaltech) · Yicom (co-founder) · Zwoop · Société Générale
VP of Engineering at Zegal: a remote team of 18, production issues cut in half, releases every two weeks, three squads running without me in the room. Co-founder CTO at Yicom: concept to launch, HK$2M in government funding, a remote ASEAN team hired at 70% lower cost. Before both, first company hire at Zwoop.
As the first company hire, Anthony has been instrumental to the success of Zwoop, which has raised multiple multi-million USD rounds of funding.
Different companies, same three conversations. If one of these sounds like yours, I can help.
Releases hurt, bugs come back, estimates drift, and nobody can say why. I've fixed this at Zegal, a legaltech scale-up (production issues halved, releases every two weeks) and I fix it the same way every time: process, quality gates, and clear priorities, installed alongside your team, not preached at them.
Half the team pastes from chatbots with no review, the other half refuses to touch it, and nobody measures anything. There is a working method between the hype and the fear: tooling, agent workflows, guardrails, and a new definition of done. I've run this transition with a production team, not on a slide.
Investor due diligence next month. A vendor contract you can't price. A hire you can't interview alone. I stand on your side of the table: I've sat through funding rounds, government grant panels, and enough vendor pitches to know exactly what to ask.
Four ways to work with me. Same person, same standard of care, whether you get two hours a week of judgment or a quarter of hands-on building.
Flagship program
Your developers, with AI agents doing the mechanical work. That is where software is going, and most teams get there by accident, badly.
In CodeRabbit's December 2025 sample of 470 open-source pull requests, AI-authored ones carried about 1.7x more issues than human-only ones, so the guardrails are the point, not an afterthought.
I've run this transition once, with a six-engineer production team: audit to daily agent workflows in about a quarter, security included.
I embed with the team you already pay: delivery rhythm, release automation, quality gates, code review culture, and mentoring for your future leads. Measured by shipped features and fewer production incidents, not by reports.
For: SMEs and startups whose team ships slower than it should
Start with an engineering auditFrom idea to working product. I architect it and write the code myself, with AI agents multiplying the output. You get software your future team can inherit, not a prototype you'll pay to rewrite.
For: pre-seed and seed founders before the first tech hire
MVP and POC buildsA standing advisory seat: roadmap, architecture, build-versus-buy, hiring plans, vendor management, and preparation for investor or board conversations. The expensive mistakes get caught while they're still cheap.
For: founders and CEOs who need CTO judgment on tap
Including build-versus-buy callsAlso on the table, without top billing: engineering OKRs and KPIs, org design and recruiting, innovation on an existing product, and vendor and project management.
No discovery theater, no lock-in. Three steps, and you keep something useful even if we stop after the second.
Thirty minutes on your situation. You leave with my read on it either way.
Free. Nothing to prepare.
One to two weeks. I read the code, meet the team, and map the product against the business. You get a written assessment with priorities and a plan.
Fixed fee. The plan is yours either way.
Advisory hours, embedded days, or a scoped build, at a fixed monthly rate sized to the plan. Monthly rolling, one month's notice.
Start small, expand when it pays.
Step one costs you thirty minutes and nothing else. Book the intro call
The fastest way to trust me is to hear what I won't pretend to be.
If one of those is what you need, tell me on the first call and I'll point you to someone better. Saying no fast is part of the service.
A full-time hire, an agency, or me. What each costs, and what it does not give you.
Runs HK$1.2M to HK$3M a year in salary alone (Robert Half, 2026 Hong Kong Salary Guide). Add MPF, equity, a recruiter's fee, and the several months it takes to hire a senior leader. And that assumes the hire is right.
Builds what you specify, but does not own the decision. You still need someone senior to tell it what to build and to check what it ships.
Fixed monthly, one month's notice. I can start the diagnostic within two weeks of the intro call, make the calls a CTO makes, and still write the code. Sized after the diagnostic, never billed by the hour for thinking.
The full breakdown, and when a full-time hire is the right call, is on how a fractional CTO is priced. Hiring in Hong Kong specifically? Here is what a fractional CTO in Hong Kong looks like locally.
A fixed monthly rate, sized after the diagnostic, never hourly. It scales down when you need less and stops with one month's notice. The comparison with a full-time hire is above; the full breakdown is on how a fractional CTO is priced.
Sometimes you should, and I'll tell you when. But a full-time CTO takes several months to hire and is a bet you can't easily undo. I can start the diagnostic within two weeks of the intro call, and you can stop with a month's notice. When you outgrow me into a full-time hire, I help you make it.
No. That's the founder path: I build the first product myself, AI-agent augmented, and make the technology decisions a technical co-founder would, then help you decide who to hire and when. If you already have a team, the job becomes making them ship.
Depends on the engagement: advisory clients get a weekly cadence plus async access; embedded engagements run one to three days a week. I keep a maximum of three active clients so that each one gets real attention, not calendar scraps.
Yes, most days. MVP builds are largely my own hands (with AI agents multiplying the output). In team engagements I code enough to review with authority: architecture spikes, hard bugs, and the example-setting pull requests.
No. I'm in Hong Kong (UTC+8), the same timezone as Singapore and most of Asia, with European mornings and US evenings in comfortable overlap. I've run teams across India, ASEAN, and Europe for years; remote-first is how I've worked since 2019. For clients in Hong Kong, Shenzhen, or Singapore I'm happy to be in the room.
A team where AI agents do the mechanical work (drafting code, tests, migrations, documentation) inside guardrails that humans design and enforce: rules, review gates, security policies, and measurement. Not "everyone has a chatbot subscription." The difference shows up in shipping speed and in how many mistakes stop at review instead of reaching production.
Never. The job is to make your existing team stronger: your lead gets a mentor and a sparring partner, your developers get processes that let them ship, and you eventually get an internal CTO promoted from within. I work myself out of the org chart by design.
The intro call within a week, the diagnostic within two, the engagement right after it. If I'm at my three-client limit I'll tell you on the call and give you a date.
Two sentences about your company and the problem is enough. I read every message myself. The call is thirty minutes, free, and if I'm not the right person I'll say so.
Point it at anthmichel.com/llms.txt: what I do in machine-readable form, plus how your agent can send me an introduction on your behalf, no form-filling needed.
