The architect of a £100M D2C technology engine.

I spent four years as the CTO who took Butternut Box from a Series A pet-food start-up to a £100M+ ARR category leader — growing the engineering organisation from four people to eighty without losing the velocity, quality or culture that made the business work in the first place.

Before Butternut Box, I built and led engineering teams inside some of the most demanding consumer businesses in Europe — marketplace technology at Just Eat, high-traffic travel at lastminute.com, and enterprise-scale commerce at eBay. Each one taught a different lesson about resilience, organisational design and what actually drives commercial outcomes.

What I learnt is that scale-up failure is rarely about the technology itself. It's about the operating model around it — the architecture decisions made (or avoided) at Series A, the hiring loop that never quite caught up with growth, the delivery rituals that worked at twelve people and collapsed at fifty.

I now work directly with D2C founders, boards and investors facing those exact inflection points. As a Fractional CTO I embed in the business, take ownership of the technology function, and apply a five-stage blueprint refined in the trenches at Butternut Box. As a board advisor I bring the clarity and credibility that high-stakes technology decisions — and investor conversations — demand.

The goal is always the same: turn your technology function from a source of risk into your most defensible competitive advantage.

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