Get Fortune 500 Talent on a Startup Budget
How to outsmart big companies and hire their best people for a fraction.
Quick Insights 🔎
💼 The Rise of the ‘Fractional Workforce’
Top Fortune 500 execs are leaving full time for fractional roles. CTO’s, CFOs, CMOs, & biotech scientists now work across companies, letting startups get elite talent for a fraction of the cost.
🚀 Why Startups Are Hiring Fractional CTOs
They drop in, untangle your stack, set your roadmap, then bounce before they get trapped in Jira politics.
⚡ Marketing Leaders Go Fractional
Fractional CMOs are up 20% annually. They date multiple brands at once, and everyone wins.
This Week's Mental Model 🧠
The Talent Density Equation
Bodies in seats are vanity, talent per dollar keeps startups alive.
Most “full time” execs I know spend 70% of their time on work you could delegate cheaper. The other 30% is strategy, vision, and execution that actually drives growth.
❌ Pay for time
✅ Pay for outcomes
Fractional hiring is expected to increase by 33% by 2026.
The fairytale 🧚
“You need full time execs who live and breathe your mission 24/7 .”
The reality ✅
Full time execs spend days in meetings that should’ve been Looms. Fractionals drop in, do the real work, and leave before your HR system remembers their birthday.
The hidden cost of full time
You’ve probably seen it too.
Full-time execs building empires just to justify their existence. They expand their remit, create dependencies, and suddenly your CMO is running an internal podcast nobody asked for.
Fractionals can’t do that. They’re forced to focus only on outcomes.
Why fractional wins
Don’t think of fractionals as second-rate. They’re not.
I’ve met many ex-Fortune 500 leaders who now rent their brains to startups for a fraction of what they used to earn. Big companies just can’t compete on meaning. The fractionals I’ve worked with say they’d rather fix real problems at startups than sit through another brand alignment meeting.
I know fractional leadership has been hyped before and mostly ignored.
But this time I believe it’s different.
We’re seeing AI agents wipe out half of teams overnight. Just look at Salesforce’s layoffs as they restructure for AI efficiency.
Layoffs have flooded the market with top talent who’d rather freelance than rot in corporate meetings all day.
As vibe coding makes launching SaaS startups easier, we'll see more founders bootstrapping instead of raising. They can’t afford full-time Fortune 500 execs. But fractional CTO’s, CFOs, and CMOs are suddenly within reach.
By 2026, over a third of US companies will use fractional execs.
Ask any VC today, they don’t care about your org chart. They care about your burn and your runway. That’s it..
Hire for outcomes
I’ve seen founders collect execs like Pokémon cards “Gotta catch ‘em all!”
Then they wonder why they’re burning $200K a month and getting nowhere.
Fractional execs don’t care about your team building offsite karaoke.
They care about results.
Paddle used a fractional CFO to untangle international tax before hiring one full time.
Brex hacked new markets with external marketing brains so their founders could keep sprinting.
Outcomes > Hours
Your stage-by-stage fractional playbook
Pre-Seed to Seed ($0-2M)
CFO: Model your runway before you run out (5-10 hrs/week)
CMO: PMF experiments, GTM tests (10-15 hrs/week)
Legal: Incorporation, early contracts (as needed)
Series A ($2-10M)
COO: Stop the chaos before it eats your team alive (10-20 hrs/week)
CTO: Architect your stack properly so it doesn’t implode
VP Sales: Build a playbook so you’re not founder-selling forever
Consider full time:
Head of Product (own the roadmap), CFO if growth >20% monthly.
Series B+ ($10M+)
Time to get real. Full time C-suite.
Keep fractionals for niche roles: board advisors, new market entries, security audits.
What fractional won’t fix
Culture: They won’t drink the Kool-Aid daily.
Deep domain knowledge: Full timers spot patterns because they’re in the weeds.
Speed pivots: They’re not sitting in your Slack 24/7.
Know these trade-offs before you commit.
When to lock them down
Wondering when to lock down that fractional exec before they ghost you?
The 30-Hour Rule
If you need them for 30+ hrs/week consistently, just marry them already.
Many fractionals convert to full time. But enjoy a 3-6 month trial before saying “I do.”
Where to find them
Skip recruiters charging $40K to send you randoms.
Toptal - Exclusive network
Shiny - 650+ vetted execs, days not months
Chief Outsiders - Marketing & sales specialists
Go Fractional - Tech leadership focus
How to engage
Hourly or retainer
Deliverables, not hours
30-day out clause
3-month test run
North star reality check for fractional hiring
If you want to outsmart big companies, fractional hiring is how you do it. You get their best people for a fraction of the cost.
But startups are marriages without honeymoons.
Late nights, stupid fights, wondering why you signed up.
Fractional lets you date before committing equity. Execs test you too. No one wants to marry a crazy founder.
Sure, fractional execs can leave fast. But full timers disappear too and cost more when they do.
Let’s be real about who fractional isn’t for:
❌ Deep-tech startups
❌ Post-Series B with 100+ employees
❌ Founders who think hours erqual value
Fractional means immediate strategy, zero long-term baggage.
Elite leadership no longer needs a $2M war chest.
Until next week, keep building, no fairytales required.
Martin, Chief Ranter at Uncharted
🎧 Track for this one
Bachman & Turner - Takin' Care Of Business
💯 After leading product at Microsoft, Slack, etc, I’ve gone fractional to help startups get real leverage. Without the full-time overhead.
The best fractional execs bring deep operating experience, skip the politics, and focus on outcomes. Not for every stage, but when it fits, it’s a force multiplier. Great write-up.