Marc van Neerven

Independent Software Business Consultant

Fractional CTO 💡 Top Startups Voice⚡ Helping startups make better SaaS

You’ve got vision.

I help you turn it into something that actually ships, scalable, beautiful, and built to last.

As a Fractional CTO, I help founders and leadership teams:

Turn strategy into execution: translating boardroom vision into working code and real traction.

Build lean, high-performing tech teams: in-house, remote, or hybrid, with just the right balance of structure and speed.

Adopt AI the right way: embedding an AI mindset into products, workflows, and decision-making before it’s too late.

Create SaaS that sells itself: through a Product-Led Growth approach that puts value before friction.

Design for humans, build for scale: applying design thinking, solid architecture, and open-web standards to grow sustainably.

My work is transformational: when I leave, your company keeps moving faster, smarter, and with more clarity than before.

I’m not a slide-deck strategist. I still code, design, and build proof-of-concepts myself, focusing (and advocating for) the Open Web, and native cloud to prove what’s possible.

You want your SaaS to grow leaner, smarter, and more human.
Let’s build it.

Startup Expert

Writing blogs about the life of a CTO at Startups and Scaleups. 

Has the world gone mad? 🤯

I just read Paul Hebert's deep dive on the Shadcn radio button ¹.

It’s thoughtful. Detailed. Carefully engineered.

And it perfectly illustrates the problem.

We are writing React components, layering abstractions, wiring state machines, and debating micro-patterns…
…to recreate something the browser does natively (and very well).

What a radio button should be:

<input type="radio" name="beverage" value="coffee" />

That’s it.

Accessible. Keyboard-navigable. Screen-reader compatible. Form-compatible. Zero JS required.

And yet the modern stack says:
- Hide the native control
- Rebuild it with divs and spans
- Reimplement focus logic
- Synchronize state with React
- Hope accessibility survives the refactor

All to achieve… styling.

But styling is not a JavaScript concern.

Styling should come from your Design System, or at least from CSS that lives in a shared asset and is cached separately.

And styling radio buttons has long been extremely easy with pure CSS.

The deeper issue isn’t Shadcn however.
It’s that we’ve normalized rebuilding HTML in JavaScript.

When your design system requires a component layer to render a radio button, something fundamental shifted.

Not everything that looks modern is progress.

Sometimes the most radical move in 2026 is to trust the platform again.

The browser ships a radio button.
Maybe we should start there.

Article in the comments.

¹ Shadcn components have become a sort of automatic goto for LLM agents - together with React and Tailwind 😔...

#puredesignsystem #webstandards #shadcn

Fractional CTO 🚀 AI Mind, SaaS Soul, Human Heart

Adam Horner

Helping CTOs, startups & scaleups accelerate • CTO coach • fractional CTO • strategy workshops

⏩ There’s no instruction manual for becoming a CTO.
You’re expected to lead strategically, but the reality is messy.

You’re in the weeds. Balancing team demands, executive expectations, delivering technology and driving business outcomes - all at once.

I know the feeling because I’ve lived it.

I made the shift from technical lead to executive without a roadmap. That experience shaped how I lead today, and how I coach.

For years, I’ve supported CTOs and senior tech leaders through coaching, helping them move from reactive execution to confident, strategic leadership.

To bring it all together I created The CTO Playbook - a leadership platform built for the full CTO journey.

The podcast carried the name first. But coaching has always been the foundation, and the core of my work.

I think of leadership like climbing a mountain:

⛺ CTO Basecamp
Cohort-based coaching to strengthen the foundations of strategic leadership. For leaders who want to move from reacting to leading with clarity and confidence.

🏔️ CTO Elevate (Coming soon) 
For leaders ready to sharpen their influence, align more deeply with business strategy, and step into a broader executive presence.

🧗🏻 CTO Ascent
Personalised 1:1 coaching for CTOs navigating scale, complexity, and high-stakes leadership - tailored to your goals, context, and growth

Each program is structured, but not prescriptive.
I’ll share my playbook, and help you build your own.

👥 Who this Is for

You’re a CTO, VP of Eng, Head of Eng, or senior technology leader doing far more than shipping code.

Maybe you’re:
- New to the role and want to lead with intention
- Growing fast and need structure to support your scale
- A seasoned CTO ready to lead with clarity and executive presence
- Tired of solving it all alone, and ready for tailored support

🎤 Community & learning

- The CTO Playbook podcast - real conversations from the seat
- A peer network of leaders facing similar challenges
- Space to connect, reflect, and grow without the noise

👇 What we work on

✔️ Gaining back time for strategy and team development
✔️ Communicating with more influence across the business
✔️ Building leadership depth beyond execution
✔️ Showing up with clarity and confidence in complex situations
✔️ Driving strategic impact aligned with business outcomes

With 30+ years in technical leadership, including a decade as a CTO, I coach from experience, using grounded frameworks, not generic theory.

📩 DM me or visit www.theCTOplaybook.com to join a cohort for CTO Basecamp or explore coaching options.

CTO & Co-founder

• Provide fractional CTO consulting (aka CTO-as-a-service) for startups and scaleups. Benefit from all the years of experience at a fraction of the cost of a full-time CTO

• Growth strategy – provide additional technical leadership to help startups confidently build the technology, product and team

• CTO mentoring – support and mentor CTOs as they build their teams and processes

• Feature delivery – identify, prioritise and help fix bottlenecks to expedite feature delivery by engineering teams

• Reliability & scalability – identify processes to automate and where additional test coverage will help you win trust and increase customer satisfaction

• Data strategy – explore the value of existing data to reduce churn, increase revenues, or reduce costs

• Information security – help security leaders identify areas of weakness and prepare for independent audits or industry certifications (SOC, ISO, CEP, GDPR etc)

• For investors – a due diligence service that highlights risks and opportunities from the product processes to the technical capabilities, covering information security, technical debt, and potential to scale

The more responsible you feel as a CTO, the easier it is to narrow your own influence.

I see this pattern in many of the leaders I coach.

They care deeply. They step in quickly. They keep things moving.

Their calendar is full. Slack never quiets. Decisions move fast.

On paper, everything looks fine.

But when we zoom out, something is missing.

They are solving problems.

They are not shaping direction.

Context switching keeps you operating at the level of urgency instead of the level of leverage.

One CTO told me, “If I don’t step in, things slow down.”

He wasn’t wrong. But every time he stepped in, he reinforced that dependency.
Over time, the organisation adjusts.

Leads wait for confirmation before committing.

Roadmaps shift mid-sprint.

Strategy gets squeezed into “next week.”

The shift isn’t about becoming less involved.

It’s about choosing the level at which you operate.

One protected strategic block per week changes the tone of executive conversations faster than most CTOs expect.

That’s not productivity advice.

It’s role clarity.

I’ll be exploring this transition — from reactive operator to strategic peer — in the live session:
Crossing the CTO Chasm
If the tension between being busy and being influential feels familiar, it’s worth joining.

📅 Attend a live session (Free)

- - - - -
👋🏽 I’m Adam Horner, CTO coach, founder, and host of The CTO Playbook podcast. I help CTOs lead with clarity, grow with confidence, and drive strategic impact.

⛺️ CTO Basecamp cohort coaching is now open. Join a live coaching session (free) and secure your spot in the next cohort.

CTO Coach | Helping CTOs lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact | Creator, The CTO Playbook | CTO Craft 100

Early in their careers, engineers are trained to solve problems quickly. When something breaks, the instinct is immediate action. A feature is needed, a system struggles, a bottleneck appears, and the natural response is to fix it.

You hear things like:

"We can just put in X."

"I can quickly build Y."

That instinct is exactly what makes someone a strong engineer. But executive leadership requires a different posture.

The strongest CTOs I work with pause before offering solutions. They clarify the problem first, explore the constraint, and make sure the room is focused on the right issue before anyone begins solving it.

At an executive level, the most valuable contribution is rarely the answer.

It is defining the right problem to solve.

👉🏽 What was the hardest mindset shift when you moved from engineer to leader?

- - - - -
👋🏽 I’m Adam Horner, CTO coach, founder, and host of The CTO Playbook podcast. I help CTOs lead with clarity, grow with confidence, and drive strategic impact.

⛺️ CTO Basecamp is now open. The cohort starts 12 March. Join before 11 March to secure your place.

I used to think the CTO’s job was to have the answers.

Earlier in my career the expectation felt simple. If something broke, you fixed it. If a system struggled, you improved it. If the business needed something built, you figured out how.

The value of the role was solving problems.

But as companies grow, something subtle begins to change.

The leadership team no longer needs another person solving operational problems. What they need is someone who can help them understand the system the business is operating inside.

And that requires a different posture.

I see this shift repeatedly in the CTOs I coach.

Many of them arrive in the role with enormous technical credibility. They are capable builders, respected engineers, and deeply trusted by their teams.

But in the executive room they often find themselves pulled back into the same pattern.

They become the person who explains the technology.

The turning point usually comes when they realise that influence at that level does not come from having the best answers.

It comes from helping the room focus on the right problems.

When that mental leap happens, the conversation changes.

The CTO stops being seen as the head of technology.

They start being seen as a business leader who happens to run technology.

Helping CTOs make that transition is one of the core themes of the work we do inside The CTO Playbook and CTO Basecamp.

Not by teaching more technology.

But by helping leaders grow into the CTO the business actually needs.

👉🏽 Learn more about CTO Basecamp

- - - - -
👋🏽 I’m Adam Horner, CTO coach, founder, and host of The CTO Playbook podcast. I help CTOs lead with clarity, grow with confidence, and drive strategic impact.

⛺️  The latest CTO Basecamp cohort starts today! Join the waitlist to stay up to date.

In coaching, one pattern comes up more often than expected.

We hear the same frustration in different words. The thinking is solid, the message is clear, and still something doesn’t land. Usually it’s not about being wrong. It’s about not being heard in the way we hoped.

Often that gap is a communication issue. Not style. Not confidence. Just that we’re not meeting others where they are.

That came through clearly in a recent conversation with Kathleen Lucente, guest on The CTO Playbook and founder & CEO of Red Fan Communications. Her experience spans journalism, IBM Research, and global communications at JPMorgan Chase. She has worked with technical leaders through high growth and high pressure. What stood out was how much of a CTO’s influence is built up close, not from a distance.

✅ Sitting in on finance and revenue meetings often updates the way we communicate. Not because we need to be fluent, but because we start to see what matters to others.

✅ Internal clarity usually comes before external confidence. When we speak with conviction inside the company, visibility often follows.

✅ In crisis planning, Kathleen described how alignment builds long before a crisis happens. Pre-mortems give leadership teams a shared lens. That kind of preparation often changes how we work together afterwards.

The CTOs I coach aren’t looking for scripts. They are building presence. And presence starts with clarity.

🎧 Listen to The CTO Playbook on any podcast app (link in comments).

👉🏻When has clearer communication upgraded how you lead?

- - - - -
👋🏽 I’m Adam Horner, CTO coach, founder, and host of The CTO Playbook podcast. I help CTOs lead with clarity, grow with confidence, and drive strategic impact.

📰 Join The CTO Playbook newsletter for weekly tips to support your CTO journey.

Adam Horner - The CTO Playbook - EP86 - Kathleen Lucente - Thumbnail

My CEO once asked me a simple question about hiring progress.

My instinct was to improve the current process — refine the job description, tighten the funnel, move faster.

It felt efficient.

But it improved the system we already had.
It didn’t question whether that system was right for where we were going.

The company didn’t need faster execution. It needed clarity on the future team shape and the capability we actually required next.

That was the moment I realised I was solving the wrong problem — optimising execution instead of shaping direction.

I see this constantly with experienced CTOs.

They’re not underperforming. They’re operating in a layer that once earned recognition — but no longer creates leverage at their current level.

That distinction — between improving what exists and defining what should exist — is one of the core transitions we work through inside CTO Basecamp.

The next cohort starts 12 March.

👉🏽 Join the CTO Basecamp waitlist.

- - - - -
👋🏽 I’m Adam Horner, CTO coach, founder, and host of The CTO Playbook podcast. I help CTOs lead with clarity, grow with confidence, and drive strategic impact.

⛺️ The next CTO Basecamp cohort starts 12 March. Join the waitlist to stay up to date.

CTO Coach | Helping CTOs lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact | Creator, The CTO Playbook

Most CTOs don’t plateau because they lack skill.

They plateau because they stay in productive work too long.

Busy work creates motion.
Productive work creates visible progress.
Impactful work creates direction.

The first two feel rewarding. The third often feels uncomfortable.

Many leaders don’t realise they’ve plateaued until influence starts slipping in subtle ways — fewer strategic conversations, more operational firefighting.

Impactful work requires:
    •    stepping back when you could step in
    •    letting capable people stretch
    •    aligning with the CEO on what truly moves the company

That transition doesn’t happen automatically.

It requires clarity about where leverage now lives.

That’s exactly what CTO Basecamp is designed to support.

The next cohort begins 12 March.

Enrollment is open.
The waitlist receives early access and a waitlist-only discount.

👉🏽 Join the CTO Basecamp waitlist.

- - - - -
👋🏽 I’m Adam Horner, CTO coach, founder, and host of The CTO Playbook podcast. I help CTOs lead with clarity, grow with confidence, and drive strategic impact.

⛺️ The next CTO Basecamp cohort starts 12 March. Join the waitlist to stay up to date.

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The Battle

Marc van Neerven

Adam Horner

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taplio

The Battle

Marc van Neerven

Adam Horner

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Marc van Neerven's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreAdam Horner's LinkedIn Performance

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Performance ScoreMarc van Neerven's LinkedIn Performance